Elvis Presley and Emmett Till never crossed paths. In 1955, when the 14-year-old black youth's brutal murder in Money, Mississippi, helped spark the civil rights movement, Elvis Presley was only beginning, at Sun Records, the recording career that was to lead to his rise to stardom as an American rock 'n' roll mucic icon.

But to Michael T. Bertrand, a visiting assistant professor of History and Southern Studies at the University, their lives and legends are as interconnected to the South of the post-World War II era as if they had been next door neighbors.

Growing up in a working-class household in Lafayette, Louisiana, in the 1970s, Bertrand, the author of the forthcoming book Southern Youth in Dissent: Rock 'n' Roll, Race, and Elvis Presley, was often at a loss to reconcile the contradictions he saw within his own community. On the one hand,"there was this solid, compassionate society of caring, Christian individuals," remembers Bertrand. "And on the other, there was another South whose attitudes about race did not square with the rest of it."

It was only later, while in graduate school and writing a dissertation on the subject of the popular phenomenon of Elvis Presley, that he had the epiphany that was to bring this earlier social discrepancy into focus and provide the basis for his book.

"As part of an assistantship for my doctoral program, I was teaching the second half of American history and I got to the civil rights movement," said Bertrand. "I came across an episode of the documentary Eyes on the Prize, which dealt with Emmett Till. It was about this African American youth from Chicago who came to Mississippi in 1955, not knowing the rules of the time. He talked 'fresh' to a white girl in Money, Mississippi, and was murdered as a result."

While the circumstances and the description of Till's murder were horrible enough, Bertrand said it was the graphic image of Till's open casket that started him thinking about the paradox of racial attitudes and the rising popularity of rock 'n' roll music in the South. "The body was totally disfigured," said Bertrand. "I thought, 'My God, how could anybody do this.' It was 1955. You had Southern white kids tuning in to Elvis and Little Richard on the radio and showing an appreciation for black culture."

But for Bertrand, the supreme irony lay in the fact that Till was murdered and Presley was lauded for violating essentially the same rules. "The Till episode was about race, sex, and class," said Bertrand, noting that the same terms have often been used to describe the phenomenon of Elvis Presley. "With Elvis, you have a singer whose music had its origins, its very essence, in American black culture. His appeal at the time was coming from a working-class segment of the population, espousing something that was social, and his performing style and suggestive movements on stage were libidinous to say the least."

A former reporter who listened to his mother's Elvis records and later watched the cult of Elvis emerge as an international phenomenon, Bertrand said he always understood that there was substance there that serious scholars needed to examine. "I wanted to do something that would perhaps bring legitimacy to it," said Bertrand, whose book is due to be published by the University of Illinois Press next fall as part of its Music in American Life series. "But I wasn't sure what that was."

He's sure now. As his book explains, the fact that the Elvis Presley and Emmett Till could "coexist" in the same place and time was symbolic of a Titan historical struggle between two different generations of Southerners. "The Till episode represented the older order, and Elvis Presley represent the new order," said Bertrand. "I think that when viewed together, they showed that the South was changing. An older order was trying to keep control of the present through the past. But a new order, still being held back by the past, was attempting to transcend that past."

Bertrand concedes that many of this same generation would later go on to vote for George Wallace. This seemingly contradictory turn of events, he claims, is not necessarily an indictment against the notion that rock 'n' roll played a role in subverting Jim Crow segregation and the racial attitudes it fostered. "There were several factors in the 1960s, in addition to civil rights issues, such as student radicalism, Vietnam War protests, class and regional economic inequality, and urban violence--issues often distorted by the media--which put white Southerners on the defensive. While many tend to judge the Southern working class and its racial attitudes as inherently unchanging and unchangeable, there is reason to believe that racial attitudes instead have changed over time, and that often those attitudes are tied to the larger economic and social environment."

In this context, Bertrand said, "the '50s and rock 'n' roll represented a small window of opportunity for racial reconciliation that emerged at a time of unprecedented prosperity and abundance in the South. Unfortunately, that window never opened wide enough or stayed open long enough to prevent the backlash from which we are still trying to recover."

Michael Harrelson