‘Anne and Emmett’ raise the ghosts of injustice

Erin Washington

In 1996, with the Clinton presidency in its prime, Boston television journalist Janet Langhart Cohen passed the man from Hope a note saying, “You must start a dialogue on race.”

More than a decade later, Langhart Cohen’s play “Anne and Emmett” sparked just such a dialogue following its U.S. premiere reading, held last week at Emerson College.

Originally published in the book “Love in Black and White: A Memoir of Race, Religion, and Romance,” written by Langhart Cohen and her husband, former U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, “Anne and Emmett” tells the story of a beyond-the-grave meeting of its two titular characters: Anne Frank, a 13-year-old German Jewish girl who hid from Nazis until she was sent to a concentration camp and died at age 15, and Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American from Chicago who was kidnapped, beaten and murdered on a trip to Mississippi in 1955. Full story