The Murder of Emmett Till

The 49-year-old story of the crime and how it came to be told.
By Randy Sparkman
Posted Wednesday, June 15, 2005, at 10:29 AM PT

Till: murdered

Despite initial protests from Emmett Till's family, the Department of Justice earlier this month exhumed the remains of the black 14-year-old murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman. At the time of the 1955 murder, Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made certain the case file crossed the desks of both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. It met with calculated indifference. Now, however, the Till case is one of a pair of decades-old civil rights crimes in which federal and state prosecutors are seeking a measure of justice. This week, 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen went on trial for planning the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman in Philadelphia, Miss. Prosecutors in that case and in the Till investigation are encouraged by convictions in the last decade for the 1963 murder of NAACP official Medgar Evers and the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., the same year.