A Dishonorable Killing

Joe Kahahawai has been called Hawaii’s Emmett Till. But unlike Till, Kahahawai’s death more than 70 years ago has never made the history books.

By Lydia Lum  

The brutal slaying in 1955 of Emmett Till by at least two White Southerners shocked and outraged the country. Published photos of the Black teenager’s mutilated body on the covers of Jet and The Chicago Defender galvanized the civil rights movement, especially in the South. 

A sadly similar crime in Hawaii 23 years earlier also led residents of that state to unite and demand social change. Like Till, 22-year-old Joe Kahahawai was murdered by angry Whites. But there is at least one stark difference between the two cases. Till’s story has been seared into the American consciousness. It is recorded in the history books.

Kahahawai’s story, meanwhile, is almost universally absent from textbooks in this country. His name isn’t even familiar to most history faculty outside Hawaii, much less to the general public.

“It’s a shame, too, because stories like this one have a lasting impact by opening up our understanding of race, class and gender issues,” says Dr. Kevin Boyle, an associate professor of history at The Ohio State University. Boyle, who has studied and taught at various institutions in the Midwest and on the East Coast, first learned of Kahahawai in the late 1990s from a Hawaiian graduate student whose work he supervised at the University of Massachusetts.

Last year, Dr. David Stannard, a University of Hawaii American studies professor, published Honor Killing, a book detailing the events and historical circumstances surrounding Kahahawai’s death. Stannard, who also has taught at Yale and Stanford universities, as well as the University of Colorado, has never seen mention of Kahahawai in any history text outside Hawaii. Yet the murder generated such a media storm during the first half of 1932 that The New York Times ran almost 200 stories about it, he says.