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When the mother of American teenager Emmett Till, Granny, asked that her son be veiled in an open casket, she wanted the image of the mutilated and unrecognizable body of the 14-year-old man to awaken the public at the racial violence that raged The United States
The lynching of Till in 1955 is still considered one of the most shocking crimes in the country today. Thousands of people accompanied his funeral and photographs of his disfigured face swept the world, raised protests and helped galvanize the civil rights movement.
The two white men accused of kidnapping, torture and murder were acquitted.
Now, more than six decades later, the US government has reopened investigations into the case.
In a report submitted to the Senate in March, but published only This week, after a report from the AP news agency, the Justice Department revealed the investigations because of the emergence of " new news."
The report does not provide details on the new indices. the case because of the ongoing investigation. But, according to a book published last year, the woman at the center of the episode that sparked the crime changed her version of the facts and confessed to lying about what had happened.
Lynching
In Chicago, Till traveled in 1955 to visit members of his family in Money, a small town in rural Mississippi, a southern state that maintained laws strict racial segregation at that time
. For the city, he went to a local market to buy sweets. The wife of the owner, Carolyn Bryant, white and aged 21, has accused Till of having whistled, uttered obscenities and seized by the waist.
Four days later, Carolyn's husband, Roy Bryant, and his brother, JW Milam, entered the house where Till was staying and took him out of bed in the middle of the night.
The teenager was brutally beaten and tortured before being shot in the head. The body was thrown into a river and found three days later
Black lynchings were not uncommon in the southern United States in the 1950s and were rarely punished.
According to data from the National Association for the Advancement of Persons (NAACP), one of the most influential civil rights organizations in the country, between 1882 and 1968, 4,743 lynchings were recorded. In 3,446 of them, the victims were black. Among white victims, many were lynched to help blacks
New Version
Roy Bryant and Milam were charged with the crime but quickly acquitted by a jury composed solely of white men
. a magazine, both confessed to the murder and said that their intent was only to scare Till and put him "in his place", but that the young man reacted with insolence.
In 2008, after decades of silence, Carolyn Bryant, now using the surname Donham, died in 1980 and Bryant in 1994 without ever being convicted. gave an interview to historian Timothy Tyson in which he contradicted his testimony in the case and denied that Till made verbal or physical advances against her.
"This part is not true," she said, according to Tyson. "Nothing of this boy has ever been able to justify what happened to him."
The interview was only revealed last year, when Tyson published the book The Blood of Emmett Till ("The Blood of Emmett Till," and led to the speculation that Carolyn should answer for his involvement in the crime.
This is not the first time that the case has been reopened.In 2004, the Ministry of Justice resumed its investigations to determine if there were other people involved. "Till's family said the news of the Justice Department's decision was" wonderful ", but it's only the moment from his exhumation that Till's body was exhumed, but the case was not upheld
Civil Rights activist Jesse Jackson reacted by Twitter: "In memory of #EmmettTill and thousands of other men, women, and black lynched children, we must finally pbad an anti-horn law ruption, "he said,
Three black senators recently introduced a bill to clbadify lynchings as a federal crime. According to parliamentarians, more than 200 proposals were unsuccessfully filed during the first half of the last century
. A similar bill was introduced in the House last month by MP Bobby Rush, representing the district where Till is buried. Last year, after the publication of the book, Rush asked Justice Secretary Jeff Sessions to reopen the case.
"I am pleased to see the federal government continue this request. It is vital that everyone, victims and perpetrators of crime, know that hate crimes of this nature will never go unpunished, "said Rush, but some see the reopening of investigations, decades later, as a symbolic gesture and ignoring the racial violence still present in the country, notably [incase of brutal violence against Blacks]
"Secretary Sessions made it clear that he had no intention of conducting investigations into violence and discrimination "said historian Matthew Countryman, professor at the University of Michigan
." With this, the Department of Justice positions itself as concerned about racial violence in the past, while not acting to resolve violence in the present. "
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