Playwright Janet Langhart Cohen and director Thomas W. Jones II discuss memory, the impact of hatred, and the use of art and theater to interrogate and preserve history.
RICHMOND, VA – Sept. 10) More than 70 years after Anne Frank and Emmett Till were murdered, playwright Janet Langhart Cohen is bringing the two teenagers together in an imagined conversation influenced by memory.
Anne & Emmett, Cohen’s play imagining a conversation between Frank, the Jewish teenager who died in the Holocaust, and Till, the 14-year-old Black boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955, comes to Spelman College at a moment when battles over history, race and antisemitism have moved from classrooms and school boards into
the center of American political life.
For Cohen, their meeting is deeply personal.
She was 14-years-old in the summer of 1955 when she encountered both teenagers’ stories. Cohen had just finished reading The Diary of a Young Girl (commonly referred to as The Diary of Anne Frank) when her mother showed her the photographs of Till’s mutilated body published in JET magazine.
“I had gone from pity at Anne’s story to anger and fear at what had happened to Emmett,” Cohen recalled. Like Till, she was Black, the same age, and living in a family that traveled South during the summers. “In one summer at 14 years of age, I had read about and heard about the inhumanity even to children.”
Yet Cohen did not connect the two teenagers at the time. Growing up in segregated America had taught her to understand their worlds separately.
That changed nearly 50 years later after a white acquaintance suggested Cohen should stop talking about racism and slavery because her own success demonstrated that she had overcome those barriers. Cohen went home angry and asked her husband a question that would eventually become a play: “What would Anne Frank have said to Emmett Till?”
Suddenly, Cohen saw what connected them.
Two children. Two societies that failed to protect them. Two lives destroyed by hatred. Two futures terminated. Two black eyes for humanity.
Cohen is careful, however, not to collapse the Holocaust and America’s history of anti-Black racial terror into one experience.
“It was sharing more than comparing,” Cohen said. “Both the Holocaust and American racism are twin evils that don’t need comparison or competition to be called for what each is: Evil.”
(Photo: Raquel M. Jackson)
Director Thomas W. Jones II sees that common humanity as the heart of the production.
“Anne & Emmett is a remarkable journey that moved beyond the tragic circumstances of two teenagers,” Jones said. “It is a reminder of our shared humanity. It is a call to action. It is a prayer for humanity.” Those ideas, he said, have kept him returning to the work for more than a decade.
For Jones, the challenge is ensuring audiences encounter Anne and Emmett not merely as historical symbols, but as young people. “The central idea in A&E is common ground,” he said. “Two teenagers,
cultures decades apart, find common ground.”
Cohen gives them that opportunity by setting their encounter not in heaven, but in a place, she calls “Memory.”
Frank’s diary ensured that generations would know her thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams. Emmett Till left no comparable written record. We have his mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s account and the historic photo of Till’s open casket, taken by photographer David Jackson and published in Jet Magazine 18 days after his murder. Cohen relied on Mamie Till-Mobley’s accounts of her son while also drawing upon striking similarities between Till’s childhood and her own to imagine his voice.
She describes that work not simply as a writer’s responsibility but as “an honor, a calling.”
Memory also allows Cohen to restore the parents whose decisions made it impossible for the world to ever forget their children. Otto Frank preserved and published his daughter’s diary. Mamie Till-Mobley insisted that her son’s brutalized body be seen. They were both children, horribly robbed of their futures, and their parents wanted and needed the world to remember them.
“Those accounts not only compel remembrance but empathy and deep pain,” Cohen said.
Memory also contributed to bringing Anne & Emmett to Spelman College. Cohen once dreamed of attending the historically Black women’s college and calls having her first play performed there nearly the realization of that youthful dream. Jones points to Spelman’s tradition and generations of alumnae who have “changed the fabric of this country.”
But Anne & Emmett is not simply looking backward; Anne & Emmett also looks forward and speaks to contemporary times that are hauntingly familiar.
At a time when schools and universities are fighting over which histories may be taught, which books may be read, and whose stories deserve remembrance, Cohen sees theater as a keeper of history.
“Despite the attempts to erase history by banning books and changing curriculum,” she said, “art, theater continue telling the stories.’
“Art, theater is a magnificent Griot,” Cohen adds.
Griots exist and remind us that memory is not passive. Remembering is an act. And when two children murdered by hatred are allowed to speak again through art and theater, it serves as a meditation on what the living intend to do with what we remember.
Anne & Emmett runs at the Latanya Richardson Jackson and Samuel L. Jackson Performing Arts Center at Spelman College, September 11-13, 2026. Click here for ticket information. Learn more about the cast here.
Nsenga K. Burton, Ph.D., founder & editor-in-chief of The Burton Wire, wrote this feature story. Follow The Burton Wire on Instagram @TheBurtonWire or Meta @ The Burton Wire.
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