YOU CAN EITHER jump into the river, or take what is in this gun.” Standing at the rock’s edge, the white man held the pistol steady and waited for the boy to make his choice. James Howard, helpless, watched his sobbing fifteen-year-old son—hands and feet bound by rope—shuffle back off the edge of the embankment, watched him plunge into the cold, deep water of the Suwannee River, where he disappeared. The lynching of Willie James Howard in January 1944 occurred more than a decade before the fourteen-year-old black youth Emmett Till was beaten and shot, and his body then dumped in a river in
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