Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
The murderers of Emmett Till didn't make much effort to hide their tracks. According to some accounts, a good portion of the white population in and around Money, Miss., could identify at least some of the people responsible for killing Till - a 14-year-old black youngster from Chicago who was accused of the unpardonable sin of whistling at a white woman in Money.
Till paid for his indiscretion by being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, beaten, shot and dumped into the Tallahatchie River. The two men who stood trial for the crime were acquitted by an all-white jury, but they later made $4,000 by selling their story to Look magazine and bragging about details of the murder. Yet the federal government ignored pleas at the time to investigate the case to determine whether Till's civil rights had been violated by a racist justice system in Mississippi. J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant both died without being punished for Till's murder.
In recent years, two documentary filmmakers have done their own investigations and turned up evidence that several people still alive participated in the murder. Spurred by the new interest in the case, the U.S. Justice Department has opened its own criminal investigation.
The Justice Department deserves credit for re-examining a crime that destroyed a family, divided a community and shamed the nation. The revived interest in the Till case also should spur renewed investigations of other similar crimes of racist hatred. For example, no one has ever been held accountable for the murders of former Florida NAACP field secretary Harry Moore and his wife, Harriette, who died after their Mims, Fla., home was firebombed on Christmas night in 1951. The FBI suspected Ku Klux Klansmen but couldn't nail them. Gov. Lawton Chiles reopened the investigation in 1992, but it came up dry. Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist met with the family last year, but he says no new evidence had surfaced. Like the new Till investigation, a reopening of the Moore case would come about 50 years too late, but there should be no statute of limitations on seeking justice in the nation's most notorious crimes of racist violence.