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It was a hot and gooey night in Money, Miss, and the air smelled of honeysuckle.
Emmett Till, aged fourteen, was deeply asleep when two white men dragged him out of bed waving a flashlight and a pistol.
The assailants beat Emmett with a bloody pulp, tore off one of his eyes and shot him in the head. They tied a 75-pound barbed wire to his body with barbed wire before throwing it into the Tallahatchie River.
The black teenager was brutally murdered in the early hours of August 28, 1955 – all for whistling a white woman at a time when the segregationist South was plunged into the pangs of Jim Crow and the grip of racial injustice.
Emmett's killers fled to trial. But Thursday, with the approach of the 63rd anniversary of his death, it appeared that the Justice Department reopened its investigation into his murder after receiving "new information."
The news comes a year after Carolyn Donham's admirable admission, The Emmett Woman Hissed, in the book "The Blood of Emmett Till."
More than 50 years after the heinous murder of Emmett, she admitted that she had lied when she claimed to have caught her and made her sexual advances that day. Emmett was just a week in his summer visit with parents in the small town of Money when he was killed.
Before jumping on a train from his native Chicago on August 20, the stocky boy, nicknamed Bobo, he received a souvenir from his mother, Mamie Till Mobley – a silver signet ring with the initials of his father Louis, "LT"
Emmett was staying with his great-uncle Moses Wright with his cousin Simeon Wright, who was two years younger than him. 19659002] On August 24, the boys and a group of friends went to the grocery store and the Bryant meat market in search of chewing gum
. Outside the store, he saw Donham, a 21-year-old white woman shop with her husband, Roy Bryant. She walked to her car when Emmett whistled – a bold move that made fear pass through Simeon and the others.
"Well, that scared us halfway," Simeon Wright told Chicago magazine in 2009. "You know, we were almost in shock, we could not get out of it fast enough because we were n & # 39; Had never heard of that before … A black boy whistling to a white woman? In Mississippi? No. "
Wright stated that the good-natured teenager, who had been said to have had a lisp, Had no idea of the problem that he had just caused.
"I think what he did was impress us, he said," You might be scared to do something like that, but not me, "said Wright, who died in 2017, in the Smithsonian Magazine. "Something else. He did not really know the danger. He did not know how dangerous it was because when he saw our reaction, he was also scared.
The group promised not to talk about the incident to Moses Wright, believing the old man would send Emmett home for his safety.
Four days later, around 2:30 am, Simeon Wright was woken up by two men later identified as Bryant and his half-brother, JW Milam.
"When I opened my eyes, I saw two white men at the foot of my bed. One had a flashlight and a gun," said Simeon Wright at the Chicago Tribune in 2014.
"They ordered me to go down again." Emmett was still sleeping, they had to shake him to wake him up. "
The men snatched Emmett off the bed and forced him to dress, while the mother of Simeon Wright pleaded with them not to take it.
Men asked a woman inside a truck, "Was it the good boy?" She answered yes.
The men threw Emmett into the truck and dragged him to the edge of Tallahatchie, where they beat him, shot him in the head and sank his body.
Bryant and Milam were broken a day after Emmett's disappearance and were thrown into jail with no connection.
Two days later, a group of boys who were fishing saw two feet out of the water.
He had been so mistreated that he was not identifiable – with the exception of his father's money ring still on his hand.
The murder of Emmett was propelled to the fore when Mobley, his mother, insisted. his body will be exposed in a glass coffin at his burial on September 3 in Chicago's South Side.
She wanted the world to see the horrible consequences that racism could have.
The mother refused to touch her son's face, which was so swollen and mutilated that it looked like a wax mask.
"I think everyone needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till," said Mobley
. . The photos of Emmett's body that have been wreaking havoc have been published everywhere, including in Jet magazine, causing mass indignation among the black community.
Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture The mother saw her son as being "crucified on the cross of racial injustice."
"And she felt that for her life not to be in vain, she needed to use that moment to illuminate all the dark corners of America and help push America forward. to what we now call the civil rights movement, "Bunch said.
Later this month, Milam and Bryant were tried on charges of murder at Sumner, Miss.
to serve on the jurors, the panel was composed of a dozen men – all whites.
During the five day trial, Moses Wright risked his life by taking the position of identifying both men as Emmett's killers in court. 19659002] But j ury was not influenced. They cleared Milam and Bryant of Emmett's murder after only 67 minutes of deliberations
The acquittals remain a purulent, unhealed wound after six decades, the Mississippi Senator, Senator David Jordan, who was attending the trial, The Post said Thursday.
"Well, you know that the old analogy that I use is that if you remove any infection from a sore, it will heal," said Jordan, 85, on the phone since his home in Greenwood, Miss.
"I think going to the bottom of that would eliminate all the infection on this case, and it would heal.And we could all finally look at it with regret, like the story, and go from there. before. "
Testimony of a funeral director, Chester A. Miller, exposed Emmett's injuries in horrible details, Jordan recalled. "He said that [Emmett] looked like a monster. He used his hands to show how distorted the face was and his head, "said Senator Jordan, who was 22 years old at the time, also remembered how the jurors laughed and chatted during the testimony. Even the accused laughed.
"No one took it seriously," says Jordan.
"They talked to each other, they joked with each other, and everything Mr. Miller had to say did not mean anything," he said. said.
"It was a travesty of justice."
A grand jury then refused to indict Milam and Bryant for kidnapping charges
A few months after the acquittal, they were paid $ 3,000 for an interview with Look magazine, in which they confessed to stabbing Emmett and killing him.
They boasted of the murder, knowing that the double criminality clause would protect them from being charged with the murder of the teenager a second time.
"Chicago boy," I said, "Milam told the magazine. "I'm fed up with sending them here to stir up trouble. Damn, I'm going to make an example of you – just so everyone can know how we are and my friends. "
More than two months after the death of the teenage girl, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of a bus in Montgomery, Ala.
"I thought about Emmett Till, and when the driver ordered me to go to the back, I could not move," said Parks, who was part of the NAACP
When the organizers planned the historic 1963 march on Washington, they made no mistake in choosing August 28 as a date.
Public segregation was abolished by the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
Donham also testified at the trial – but the jurors never heard him because he was deemed inadmissible – yet she said that Emmett told him that he had done so. something "with a white woman before" and that a "n– -r man" took her arm in the store. "He said," how about d & # 39; a date, baby? ", she testified, according to a transcript of the lawsuit published by the FBI about ten years ago.
She said that she was away but that the man caught her waist a few moments later. "She said under oath."
But in "The Blood of Emmett Till", author Timothy Tyson wrote that the mother of two confessed in 2007 that everything was invented.
" That's not true "Donham, 72, told Tyson that, according to her, Emmett came on her verbally and physically." Nothing of this boy has ever been able to justify what it happened to him. "
Donham, who divorced Bryant and went to get married twice more, claimed that she could not remember any other details of that day." Tyson, a senior researcher from Duke University, told Vanity Fair last year. "She was happy that things had changed [and she] thought that the old system of white supremacy was bad, although she more or less considered it normal at that time. "
The revelation that the Justice Department reopened the case of Emmett a r annual federal contribution sent to legislators end of March. The 1955 assassination was one of the "activities" that the agency was investigating under an unresolved civil crime law named for Emmett in 2007, reported CNN. The law authorizes the authorities to "promptly investigate" unresolved civil rights murders prior to 1980.
The Justice Ministry refused to comment on the report and the new "information" they had available. Were not clear
.
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