“It is very important in the school business to keep these sorts of things fresh,” he said.

​

Recker started thinking about Emmett. In 2009 he had participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on landmarks in American history at the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University in Cleveland, Miss. The seminar focused on delta culture: the blues, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 — and Emmett Till.
​
Recker presented the idea to the students, and they were enthusiastic.
​

He ordered Delta State's traveling pictorial history exhibit on the Till case, which now is on display at the school. It documents the trial of the two white men accused of killing Emmett. The men were acquitted in September 1955. Months later, they admitted in an article published in Look magazine that they had killed the teenager.Anne and Emmett,” which so far has been in limited  production, was written by Janet Langhart Cohen, a former broadcast journalist and wife of former U.S.Defense Secretary William Cohen, who calls King her mentor.Langhart Cohen said she has been holding the play back, refining it. She identifies closely with both Anne and Emmett, she said, and she wanted to do them justice. An African-American, she also is of Jewish descent, as is her husband. She loved Anne Frank's diary, which she read when she was about the same age as its author.Langhart Cohen said she initially had reservations about Brownell-Talbot's request to do an excerpt of the play. But then she learned Recker planned to perform it on King's birthday. And that he understood what she was trying to say, about the need to know history in order to avoid repeating it.

​

“The play is a call to action for everyone,” Langhart Cohen said. “When they see injustice, when they see intolerance ... not to be a silent witness and walk away. They have to do something. That's what I want for the students and for the play.”
​