Civil Rights Activists Seek Justice for Racial Violence in the Name of Emmett Till

[pmorlan1]

On the day of her death, Mamie Till Mobley was scheduled for a call with Mississippi assistant attorney general Jonathan Compretta, civil rights activist Alvin Sykes, and Keith Beauchamp, a filmmaker working on a documentary about the August 1955 lynching of her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till. The two white men who kidnapped and murdered Till were acquitted within weeks of the killing, and Mobley spent the rest of her life fighting to have the case reopened. On that day, almost 48 years later, it seemed that events might finally bend towards some form of belated justice.

Mobley, who died on January 6, 2003, didn’t live to see it, but in 2004 the Department of Justice reopened Till’s case to determine whether anyone else had been involved beyond the original defendants, who admitted to the killing after they were acquitted. In 2005, investigators exhumed Till’s body, photos of which had shocked the country in 1955. Two years later, a grand jury declined to bring charges against five surviving individuals, including Carolyn Bryant, the wife of one of the killers, whose encounter with Till sparked the events leading to his murder. In 2007, the case was closed once again.

Mamie Till Mobley stands before a portrait of her slain son, Emmett Till, in her Chicago home on July 28, 1995. Since Emmett's lynching 40 years ago, Mobley has been committed to making sure that his death is remembered and never repeated. Till was kidnapped, tortured and lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman in a small Mississippi town. (AP Photo/Beth A. Keiser)

Till’s murder deeply inspired the struggle for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. But it was only one of dozens of other racially motivated murders that took place primarily in the South that were never solved. The fight Till’s mother started eventually led to the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act — a bipartisan effort to reopen investigations into racially motivated murders that occurred before 1970. That legislation, which will expire in 2017, led to dozens of cases being reopened, to little success.

Now civil rights advocates are pushing for the act to be reauthorized, strengthened, and expanded to include all racially motivated murders. In late April, a bipartisan group of legislators introduced a new bill in both the House and Senate aiming to do just that.

https://theintercept.com/2016/05/09/civil-rights-activists-seek-justice-for-racial-violence-in-the-name-of-emmett-till/