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
It capsizes in the 90 degree list to port.
Don't count on it. His grave was desecrated last week. Seems the poor man just can't rest in peace, be it from hooligans or Democrats.
That's what I was thinkin', too!!! No more hits for the C-L!
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