U.S. Reopens '55 Murder Case, 
Flashpoint of Civil Rights Era
 

By ERIC LICHTBLAU 
ANDREW JACOBS

WASHINGTON, May 10 -- Nearly a half-century after the brutal killing of Emmett Till, 
a 14-year-old black youth, in Mississippi provided a flashpoint in the civil rights movement, the Justice Department said Monday that it was opening a criminal investigation into the case in light of new evidence. 

In a surprise announcement, prosecutors said information uncovered in the filming of two documentaries on the 1955 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 at the Justice Department.

Black leaders consider the killing one of the last resolved murders of the early civil rights era, and a campaign has been building for months to push federal officials to re-examine the case. The new information gathered by the filmmakers suggests that as many as 10 other 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 and chief executive officer of the N.A.A.C.P. 

Emmett Till, a Chicagoan who was visiting relatives in Money, Miss., that August, was dragged from his bed, beaten, shot and dropped in the Tallahatchie River after he had been accused of whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's store. The image of Emmett's battered body in an open coffin at his funeral in Chicago became a galvanizing moment in the civil rights movement, particularly for many Northerners removed from the brutalities of the Jim Crow era.

Testimony from witnesses linked two white men -- Carolyn Bryant's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J. W. Milam -- to the crime. But an all-white jury acquitted them after the defense appealed to the jurors' white heritage. The defendants later gloated about the killing and provided gruesome details about the torture and murder in a Look magazine article. Both are now dead.

Mr. Acosta of the Justice Department called the acquittals a "gross miscarriage of justice" that moved the country to begin to confront the racism and segregation of the South.

The federal government did not investigate 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 if others are now implicated, they could still be prosecuted by the State of Mississippi on charges of murder or perhaps other crimes, officials said. Mr. Acosta said that officials had already conducted a preliminary review into the new information and that federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents would work with the local authorities in Mississippi.

"At the end of the day, there may not be a prosecutable crime, but it's a case of such importance that it's worth taking a chance to see what's there," said a senior Justice Department official speaking on condition of anonymity. 

Simeon Wright, a cousin of Emmett who shared a bed with him the night he was abducted, said he had been waiting for justice in the case most of his life.

"I'm elated by this," said Mr. Wright, a retired pipe fitter who lives in Chicago. "It's a great decision. Something had to be done."

Mr. Wright said the killing fractured what had once been a close-knit family, and relatives fled Mississippi for Chicago soon after the defendants were acquitted. His father, a cotton farmer who stood up in court to point out the accused men, had to leave most of the family's possessions behind, Mr. Wright said.

"Our world was never the same after that," he said.

The re-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. Mr. Beauchamp said that based on his research, he believed five people were still alive who were involved in or had knowledge of the killing. Emmett's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, who died last year, was involved in the making of the film.

In recent years, Mr. Beauchamp has toured the country showing a partly completed version of his film, "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till," to drum up public support for a re-examination of the case. He has met with the federal authorities to plead his case and has also enlisted the help of members of Congress like Senator Charles E. Schumer and Representative Charles B. Rangel, both Democrats of New York.

Mr. Schumer said in an interview that he was "pleasantly surprised" by the Justice Department decision, but that investigators should now move quickly.

"Time is of the essence because so many of the witnesses and even the possible conspirators are older," he said. "In a case like this, justice delayed should not be justice denied."

A second filmmaker, Stanley Nelson of Manhattan, produced and directed a 2003 documentary titled "The Murder of Emmett Till" that has been broadcast on PBS and is scheduled to receive a Peabody Award next week. That documentary has also been reviewed by the Justice Department, officials said.

Mr. Nelson said he was hopeful the investigation would lead to charges against others.

"There were a number of people who had evidence about the murder who did not testify at the time because they were scared," he said. "We were able to go to Mississippi and find people in a week or two who had evidence to give. So if you have trained investigators with subpoena powers, who knows what will come of this?"

As part of his documentary, Mr. Nelson said, he interviewed a Mississippi man, Oudie Brown, who remembered seeing another man cleaning up blood shortly after the killing. "That's Emmett Till's blood," Mr. Brown said the other man had told him.

The Till murder is one of several civil rights cases that have been reopened long after most people thought they had been consigned to the history books. In 1994 in Jackson, Miss., a jury of eight blacks and four whites took six hours to convict Byron De La Beckwith, then 73, in the 1963 slaying of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Mr. Beckwith, a white segregationist, had been tried twice in 1964; both times the all-white juries had deadlocked.

Last year the Justice Department helped convict a 72-year-old former Klansman, Ernest Avants, in the 1966 slaying of a black sharecropper, Ben Chester White. The slaying was part of a plot, prosecutors said, to kill the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In trials in 2002 and 2001, two former Klansmen were convicted in the 1963 church bombing that killed four girls in Birmingham, Ala.

The re-examination of the Emmett Till killing came a week after the Justice Department announced an agreement forcing Cracker Barrel restaurants to ban discrimination against black diners.

Civil rights advocates were divided over whether the developments in the Till and Cracker Barrel cases represented a more aggressive posture under Mr. Acosta's leadership or politically motivated moves in an election year.

"We're happy to see the Justice Department stepping up to the plate, whatever the motivation," said Dennis Hayes, general counsel for the N.A.A.C.P. "Time will tell what it means. But two civil rights cases do not a trend make."
 

Eric Lichtblau reported from Washington for this article and Andrew Jacobs from Money, Miss.