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He worked as a security guard at a mall near her home in Meridian, Mississippi. But Lewis knew him as someone else – the man who murdered the father that she had never known.
He was called Lawrence Rainey and was part of a group of men arrested in the infamous "Mississippi Burning" murders of three young civilians. Rainey, who was a Mississippi sheriff at the time of the murders, was arrested but later acquitted by a white jury. He will live openly in Mississippi until his death in 2002 at age 79, widely regarded as someone who took part in these infamous murders and got out of it with him.
Lewis was born a week after the murder of his father and did not learn how he died until the age of 13. She kept her identity secret as a young woman. When the murders were raised in her high school history class, she said nothing.
She did the same every time she walked by Rainey in the mall.
"I do not think he has ever changed," said Lewis, who became a nurse and married a policeman. "I do not think that a conversation would have changed, according to what I heard, he was still talking to us about" n ". "
I interviewed Lewis for a book years ago and I thought about his story when I heard this week that the federal government had reopened its investigation into the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. The 14-year-old black man was murdered in Mississippi for allegedly flirting with a white woman
Two men were arrested in the murder of Emmett but were acquitted less than a month later by an all-white jury, knowing that the double jeopardy laws prohibited them from being tried again, they confessed to the murder a year later in an interview with Look magazine.
Now the Department of Justice says it reopens the investigation, 63 years after the murder, based on new information: A central witness has apparently changed its story.
Most of the recent stories about Emmett Till deal with the same themes: the legal challenges of resuscitating civil rights cases; the relevance of his murder in an era of "Black Lives Matter"; the impact of these macabre images of Emmett on the psyche of African Americans.
Yet there is another side to stories like Till that we rarely talk about:
How did family members cope with pain see the killers of their loved ones released or slapped at the wrists by all-white juries?
And even worse, how did they cope with bumping into these men again and again in their communities for years?
& # 39; She was to serve him coffee & # 39;
Many Americans assume that the killers of people like Emmett Till have been brought to justice. Massive publicity usually included such cases, investigations were launched, and in many cases people knew who the killers were.
The truth is much uglier. Many have been celebrated as heroes – the pillars of their community – while family members of the victims have been treated as lepers and driven out of their community
![] An undated photo of Emmett Louis Till](http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/180712094843-01-emmett-till-file-large-169.jpg)
"The cities of the South over the last six or seven decades have been well populated by whites who have killed blacks and pulled out of them," says Hank Klibanoff, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose podcast, "In one of the most notorious cases, four black girls were killed in 1963 when members of the Ku Klux Klan planted sticks of dynamite in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama The investigators quickly appealed to four suspects, but the FBI filed the case five years later without filing a complaint. 1977 that one of the suspects was tried and re Two others were eventually sentenced in the early 2000s.
Klibanoff remembers a case of a black man who was beaten to death by police in a southern city. . The same sheriff widely known for committing the murder often visited a cafe where the black man's sister was working.
"And she had to serve him coffee," said Klibanoff.
People forget the psychic tribute that she took – and still takes – on people like her.
Some have survived their faith.
"That's what the families themselves brought them. ", Said Klibanoff." It was a deep religious foundation for some, they are deeply spiritual people, they control their emotions a lot and do not let their anger devour them alive. "
In 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, a former Klansman, was sentenced to 60 years in prison in 2005 for arranging the murders. He died in prison at the age of 92.
The lack of justice enraged Chaney when he was a young man. He moved to New York and became a civil rights activist as his brother killed. But he rejected non-violence.
In April 1970, he accompanied a friend on a trip to Florida to pick up a shipment of weapons for a unit of the Black Liberation Army when Chaney was involved in the fatal shooting of four whites. Then, 18, he was convicted of three of the murders – charges he still denies years later – and sentenced to life in prison. He served 13 years before former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark intervened and persuaded the Parole Board to release him
"There was a time when I felt like I was hated humanity, "said Chaney. "I wanted to vent my hatred and anger at the whites, who were for me the main perpetrators of evil in the world."
White families also suffered
[19659002HoweverblackfamilieswereabletocontributetothiskindofsufferingOnlythreewhitefamiliessurvivedwiththepainofhavingthosewhowerethefirstoffenders
This is what happened to the parents of Viola Liuzzo, a housewife in Detroit killed by White supremacists in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 after traveling south to participate in civil rights protests.
I spoke to Penny Liuzzo Herrington, his daughter, who told me what his family endured. A white jury composed of men acquitted four men in the murder of Liuzzo, one of whom was later revealed to be an FBI informant. Another trial was held later and three men were sentenced to ten years in prison for violating Liuzzo's civil rights.
The mild punishment and what happened to his family after his mother's death seemed like a second death blow, Herrington said.
Hate mail flooded their home. Crosses were burned on their lawn. His father started drinking and never recovered. His two brothers dropped out of high school.
Her youngest sister, Sally, faced her own ordeal. When she went to school after her mother's death, the children threw stones at her and taunted her. Herrington took his younger sister to his mother's grave years later, and burst into tears.
"She sobbed on my shoulder," Please tell me what she looked like, I do not remember. remember his voice. "
Lewis, the daughter of James Earl Chaney, faced the same challenge with his father. She does not remember him, because she never got to know him.
"I did not realize what I missed before seeing my daughter with her dad," she said. "Just to hear him call Daddy and how he is still there for her – it's the only time I've had that feeling of nostalgia."
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. liked to say, "The bow of the moral universe is long but it leans toward justice. "
But does he bend to justice for people like Lewis and Herrington?"
He spent so much time that lives were irretrievably damaged. Will reopening decades old cases just remind family members of what they've lost?
It's a question to which no new investigation into Emmett Till's murder will can answer.
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