CLEVELAND, Miss. -Where was the Justice Department when Mississippi needed it?
Instead of getting to the bottom of an absolute mockery of justice when the truth of Emmett Till's murder was still fresh in the pages of the now long extinct Look magazine, the feds come down and intervene 50 years after the fact, beat en to the punch by a bunch of independent documentary filmmakers. The timing is almost laughable. Too little too late, guys.
All tardiness aside, it's difficult to argue against the recent reopening of the Emmett Till investigation. Here we have a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago who reportedly "sassed" a white woman in Money and was lynched for it, brutally, and two white men who, after they were acquitted, confessed their guilt in a national magazine for $4,000. The murderers, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, have been dead for years. Now, we've learned there might be others involved.
Time doesn't absolve guilt, just as it hasn't diminished the evil incarnate in this crime. The symbolic gesture of this investigation - as did the conviction of another Delta villain, Byron De La Beckwith, 30 years after he killed Medgar Evers - could have a monumental impact on racial reconciliation in Mississippi, a state that no matter how far it has come still has a ways to go. As Sen. Charles Shumer of New York said last week in response to the news, "In a case like this, justice delayed should not be justice denied."
But it will take more than another round of federal intervention to bring any justice to Emmett Till's horrific end. For real healing to occur, the initiative will have to come from within Mississippi, and more essentially the Delta itself.
Sometime last year in Money, the roof over the front porch of the old Bryant's Store, where Till committed the "faux pas" that led to his death, collapsed. The building is in bad shape, but it's still a powerful memorial to what happened in 1955. Just standing in front of it and gazing at the splintered ruins inside, to imagine Emmett passing through that door, is a visceral experience in itself. Just standing there.
We in the Delta should take a lesson from the citizens of Neshoba County, who this summer are coming together to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the lynching that took place there of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. The decrepit store in Money should be preserved in its present state and declared a national civil rights monument.
There is still time left before the 50th anniversary of Leflore and Tallahatchie counties' own dark tale.
The same veneration could extend to dozens of civil rights landmarks that dot the Delta, unmarked and for the most part unknown. In Greenwood alone, there are the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee's headquarters on Avenue I; Broad Street Park, where Stokely Carmichael first coined the Black Power movement; and Wesley United Methodist Church, the site of many rallies led by the likes of Medgar Evers and Dick Gregory.
The memories these places carry aren't always pleasant, but they constitute major history that happened right here in the Delta. The significance of the grassroots push of the civil rights struggle, a spirit famously embodied in the Greenwood movement, ranks up there with the Revolutionary War as far as upholding human liberties and democratic principles. Read Duke history professor Charles Payne's "I've Got the Light of Freedom," which focuses Greenwood.
A common argument against reopening decades-old civil rights cases is that they stir up racial hatred long after the animosities of that era have burned out. Children, it is said, don't know about Emmett Till, and there's no sense in exposing them to the violence of a bygone era when we have come so far.
What happened to Emmett Till does not divide people. It appalls people. I've seen it bring together a roomful of people, black and white, in acknowledgement of the inhumanity embodied in the crime.
The worst thing we could ever do is to sweep Emmett Till under the rug. It's important for many reasons that we talk about his story and memorialize his life as well as the atrocity that ended it. The murder of Emmett Till is a reminder of a dark past that we must acknowledge from all sides of the community so we don't repeat it.
It is also a distinct measure of how far the state of Mississippi actually has come.
If Delta schoolchildren or anyone else doesn't know about the Emmett Till story, the potential to teach them could be the most meaningful result to come out of this latest chapter.
- John Martin, a former reporter for the Commonwealth, works at the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University.
