Some newbie said "Who gives a sh*t?" and got banned.
Don't know why I remember that. I just do.
Posted on 05/10/2004 6:58:02 PM PDT by WKB
Washington, May 10 Reuters - Nearly a half century after Emmett Till's mutilated body was found in a Mississippi river, the US Justice Department on Monday reopened an investigation into the murder of the black teenager whose death helped spark the civil rights movement.
FBI agents and other personnel will be sent to Mississippi to assist local authorities in investigating the 1955 murder, which horrified the country and added fuel to the civil rights movement.
Till, a 14-year old from Chicago, was kidnapped and killed while visiting family in Money, Mississippi in August 1955.
Two white men, Roy Bryant and J W Millam, were charged with Till's killing, but were acquitted by an all-white jury.
The men later described in a magazine interview how they had beaten Till -- who had apparently whistled at Bryant's wife -- shot him, then tied a fan to his neck with barbed wire and pushed his body into the river.
Because they had already been acquitted, the men could not be retried. No others were ever indicted or prosecuted for involvement in the kidnapping or murder.
Till's mother decided to have an open-coffin funeral to let the world see what racism had done to her son. His death came to symbolise the brutality of lynching in the south.
"Pictures and magazine articles of Emmett's murder shocked our country," said Alexander Acosta, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.
"Emmett Till's brutal murder and grotesque miscarriage of justice moved this nation. The murder of Emmett Till stands at the crossroads of the American civil rights movement."
Rep Charles Rangel, an influential black Democrat from New York, has been one of the many lawmakers and family members who have been pushing for the case to be reopened. He applauded the Justice Department's announcement on Monday.
"Many of us have demanded that they do just that because this stain on the United States of America is not a local racial thing it's a national thing," he told reporters in New York. "The only way that you can cut this cancer out is by showing Americans we don't tolerate that type of behaviour."
"Emmett Till was tortured and assassinated and his mother was one of the heroes because with all her pain she refused to have that casket closed," Rangel said. "She wanted the world to see how cruel people could be and as a result those people should be brought to justice."
The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People has also called for the case to be reopened. In a letter to the Mississippi attorney general last year, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume urged the government to reopen what he called "one of the last unresolved cases of the civil rights era."
Acosta said the possible involvement of others in the murder had come to his attention over the past few months.
The information that several other people may have been involved -- some of whom may still be alive -- emerged in part during the production of a documentary in which the filmmaker interviewed several potential witnesses.
Although the five-year statute of limitations in place at the time of the crime prohibits any federal prosecution, Mississippi may still be able to prosecute any others charged in connection with Till's murder, Acosta said.
The new investigation is aimed at determining whether any prosecutions remain possible under state law
How true. What a horrible thing for a mother to go thru. Too bad Charlie Rangel has to cheapen it by attaching his name to it.
Some newbie said "Who gives a sh*t?" and got banned.
Don't know why I remember that. I just do.
And just what does James Byrd have to do with Emmett Till?
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Well, what they have in common is that the Democrats like to highlight lynchings around election time because they claim that Republicans are for them (never mind the fact that probably close to all lynchings of blacks have been perpetrated by Democrats or their friends). What will happen here is they will drudge up this old story, implying that now we can get the guys who did this terrible crime. The problem is that after all this time it would be almost impossible to prove in a court of law who else was in on this. Therefore, the Feds won't indict anybody. Then Rangel will get up and accuse Bush and Ashcroft of being racists, and Kerry will say that when he's president he will appoint and AG who will make cases like this a priority.
Ever notice how the homeless only seem to appear in newspaper stories when the President is a Republican? That sort of thing...
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