U.S. to study death long left unavenged

New evidence emerges in the 1955 murder of a teen that kindled the civil rights movement.

WASHINGTON - It was a steamy afternoon in August 1955 when Emmett Till drifted into Bryant's grocery store, bought 2 cents' worth of bubblegum and did something other blacks in the Mississippi Delta knew was taboo.

He whistled at the attractive white shopkeeper, Carolyn Bryant. Days later, the 14-year-old's mutilated body was pulled out of the Tallahatchie River. Two white men implicated by witnesses were acquitted by an all-white jury.

Now, nearly a half-century after the killing became a flashpoint in the civil rights movement, the Justice Department said Monday that it was opening a criminal investigation into the Till case in light of new evidence.

Prosecutors said information uncovered in the filming of two documentaries on the killing suggested that people besides the two original suspects may have been involved.

"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," said R. Alexander Acosta, assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Black leaders consider the killing one of the last unsolved murders of the early civil rights era, and a campaign has been building for months to push federal officials to examine the case. The new information gathered by the filmmakers suggests that as many as 10 people took part in or observed the killing.

The re-examination of the case is a bittersweet victory for civil rights advocates. "I am glad the case is being reopened, but it is sad that it has taken so long," said Kweisi Mfume, president of the NAACP.

A case like Emmett's wasn't particularly uncommon in the segregated South in the 1950s. It galvanized public outrage, though, partly because of Emmett's age and because his mother, Mamie, insisted that his casket be open so that mourners coming to pay respects on Chicago's South Side could see how badly disfigured her son was. Emmett, a Chicago resident, was visiting relatives in Money, Miss., when he was killed.

"When people saw what happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before. People became vocal who had never vocalized before," Mamie Till said in an interview with PBS before her death in January 2003. "Emmett's death was the opening of the civil rights movement. He was the sacrificial lamb of the movement."

Three months after Emmett's body was fished from the waters of Mississippi, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Ala., setting off the legendary bus boycott.

Witness testimony linked two white men - Carolyn Bryant's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. Milam - to Emmett's murder. About a month after the funeral, an all-white jury acquitted the pair after their attorney told the jurors that their forefathers would turn in their graves if the men were convicted.

Later, Bryant and Milam sold their story to Look magazine for $4,000.

In the interview, the pair described dragging Emmett out of bed at his uncle's house and taking him to Milam's tool shed, where they smashed his head. They then shot him in the head and dumped him into 20 feet of muddy water in the Tallahatchie River. To ensure that he didn't bob to the surface, they tied a 75-pound cotton gin fan to his neck with barbed wire.

Milam died in 1980, followed by Bryant 10 years later.

The federal government never investigated the case at the time, despite numerous pleas, and the five-year statute of limitations then in place for federal civil rights crimes has long expired.

But others could still be prosecuted by Mississippi on charges of murder or perhaps other crimes, officials said.

The fresh examination of the case was prompted in part by Keith Beauchamp, 32, a filmmaker from New York City who spent the last nine years making a documentary about the killing. Beauchamp said that based on his research, he believes five people are still alive who were involved in or had knowledge of the killing.

In recent years, Beauchamp has toured the country showing an unfinished version of his film, The Untold Story of Emmett Till, to drum up public support for a new examination of the case. He has met with federal authorities and has enlisted the help of members of Congress like Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Charles Rangel, both D-N.Y.

A second filmmaker, Stanley Nelson of New York City, produced and directed a documentary titled The Murder of Emmett Till that has been broadcast on PBS and is to receive a Peabody Award next week. That documentary has also been reviewed by the Justice Department, officials said.

- Information from the New York Times, Knight Ridder Newspapers and Washington Post was used in this report.

World and national headlines

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times 490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 Contact the Times | Privacy Policy Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright