New mystery over lynching of Emmett Till 50 years ago

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New mystery over lynching of Emmett Till 50 years ago
By Andrew Gumbel, in Los Angeles
Published: 01 August 2005

Fifty years after the race crime that, more than any other, galvanised early support for the civil rights movement in the American South, the death of Emmett Till is still stirring up racial animus and painful emotions, hinting at deep, undisclosed secrets in the sweltering countryside of northern Mississippi.

He was a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago who, during a summer visit to his relatives in the segregated South, made the mistake of walking into a convenience store and wolf-whistling at the owner's pretty young wife. When the store-owner heard about it, he and his brother-in-law arranged a lynching party, descended in the dead of night on the house where the boy was staying and tore him away from the embrace of his distraught relatives.

By the time his assailants were done with him, he had been beaten, shot, hogtied with barbed wire attached to a heavy fan and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. When his body was found, his face was horribly disfigured and pulled out of shape, with one eye hanging from its socket. His relatives could identify him only by the signet ring his mother had given him as a keepsake for the journey.

The crime attracted national attention, not only because of its intrinsic horror, but because an all-white jury acquitted Roy Bryant, the store owner, and his brother-in-law, JW Milam. The verdict was motivated, at least in part, by deliberate defiance towards the burgeoning movement towards racial integration.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article302914.ece