The Justice Department announced on Monday that it is opening an investigation into the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, whose brutal slaying laid bare the violent underpinnings of Southern segregation and helped launch the civil rights movement.
The horribly mutilated face of the 14-year-old Chicago boy provided an iconic image of injustice after his mother chose to show his badly beaten body in an open-casket funeral. Jet magazine published a photo of the boy lying in state that galvanized black America and tugged at the conscience of the nation.
Two white men who later admitted to killing Till, for allegedly whistling at a white woman while he was on vacation visiting relatives in Money, Miss., were acquitted by an all-white jury. Both have since died.
But Mamie Till-Mobley, Till’s mother, who died early last year, campaigned the rest of her life for an investigation into the involvement of accomplices in her son’s kidnapping and murder.
Two recent documentaries and a book have focused attention on evidence of accomplices’ roles in the crime, and the cause has received growing attention during the past few months. The Chicago and New York City councils passed resolutions urging a new investigation this year.
The reopening of the Till case follows successful prosecutions in recent years of the perpetrators of several infamous crimes committed during the civil rights era. In 2002, federal authorities convicted a former Klansman for the 1963 Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that killed four black girls. And Mississippi state authorities convicted Byron de la Beckwith in 1994 for the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1963.
Till “was the spark that ignited the civil rights movement,” said Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), a former Black Panther leader who has spearheaded efforts in Congress to reopen the case. “Before my generation rides off into the sunset, the spirit of Emmett Till demands justice.”
Gathering with other family members and supporters at Rush’s South Side Chicago office to celebrate news that the case had been reopened, Lillian Jean Jackson, stepdaughter to Mamie Till-Mobley, said her late stepmother “would be so pleased today, she would almost be jumping just like a kid.”
R. Alexander Acosta, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said the Justice Department decided to open an investigation into Till’s murder based on evidence uncovered during production of a documentary and other information given the department because of new interest in the case. He declined to be more specific.
“We owe it to Emmett Till, we owe it to his mother and to his family, and we owe it to ourselves to see if, after all these years, any additional measure of justice is still possible,” Acosta said in Washington.
Acosta said a five-year statute of limitations on federal crimes in effect at the time of the killing bars any federal prosecution. But the investigation is being conducted jointly with the local district attorney, who has authority to prosecute accomplices because Mississippi has no statute of limitations on murder.
Keith Beauchamp, maker of “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” said that in February he gave a federal prosecutor in Mississippi filmed interviews of eyewitnesses with information on accomplices and names and contact information for a number of witnesses.
Beauchamp’s documentary includes an interview with a witness who is said to have been jailed in another city at the time of the trial of Till’s killers in order to prevent him from testifying.
Testimony at the murder trial also points to as many as five other participants in the crime, said Christopher Benson, a Chicago journalist and who co-authored with Till-Mobley “Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America.”
Other accounts suggest as many as 10 people may have been involved, Benson said.
Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, pulled Till at gunpoint from his uncle’s house in the middle of the night a few days after Till allegedly whistled at Bryant’s wife outside a country store Bryant owned. It was never clear whether Till intended to flirt with her, because his family said he often made whistling sounds because of a stutter.
His body was recovered a few days later in the Tallahatchie River with an industrial fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. He was shot in the head and so badly beaten that his family had to identify him by a ring on his finger.
Mississippi officials tried to bury his body quickly and ordered his casket remain sealed when his mother insisted on returning it to Chicago. She insisted he be shown in an open coffin in a funeral that drew thousands to a South Side church.
“Let the world see what I have seen,” she said.
Many African-Americans who were alive at the time can recall their first glimpse of the photo of Till’s grotesquely disfigured face. Rosa Parks said she was thinking of Till when she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., 100 days after the boy’s death.
“Learning about Emmett Till was something of a rite of passage for many black Americans,” Benson said. “That picture stripped away the innocence of our childhood–to know that you could be hurt, killed by white people for no other reason than that you were black.”
Bryant and Milam were acquitted in just 67 minutes by a jury despite dramatic testimony from Till’s elderly uncle, pointing his finger across the courtroom at the two men who took his nephew from their house.
Federal authorities did not investigate the crime at the time.
Soon afterward, in a 1956 interview with Look magazine, Milam admitted that he and Bryant killed Till.
“Chicago boy, I said, `I’m tired of them sending your kind down here to stir up trouble,'” Milam was quoted as saying. “I’m going to make an example of you, just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.”
