Last in a series.
State Sen. David Jordan has vivid memories of the trial of the men accused of killing Emmett Till in 1955.
Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were charged in the lynching of the black 14-year-old but were acquitted by an all-white jury. The two white men later acknowledged their guilt in a magazine interview.
A freshman at Mississippi Valley State University then, Jordan was required to attend the trial and report on it. He even remembers some people laughing during the court recesses. "To me looking on as a young 19-year-old, it was a mockery of justice," the Greenwood Democrat said.
That unflattering picture of Mississippi - particularly the Delta - as a backward, defiantly segregationist place was transmitted to the world by some 70 reporters and the three TV networks who converged on Sumner to cover the trial. It's an image that the state has struggled to shake in the half-century since.
Although Emmett Till has never completely vanished from the media's radar screen, interest in his death has seen a resurgence in the past two years, particularly since the U.S. Justice Department reopened in 2004 its investigation into the murder.
The case has been the subject of two documentaries, a CBS "60 Minutes" segment and extensive coverage in newspapers and magazines in New York, Chicago, Atlanta and around the world.
Alvin Sykes, a Kansas City, Mo., human rights activist who lobbied successfully for the case's reopening, said he grasped the international reach of the story when he saw his name on a Turkish newspaper's Web site.
Some people may not like to revisit these events, and that is their right, said Jordan. The senator represents in the state Legislature both Leflore County, from where Till was abducted, and Tallahatchie County, where the trial was held.
However, he added, both whites and blacks recognize that a great wrong was done, and there can be forgiveness and healing if the truth is told.
"You cannot stumble into the future backwards," he said.
Jordan said that if some still have "a perception of ignorance" about this area, it's up to people here to prove them wrong.
Dr. William Ware, who was a sophomore at MVSU at the time of the trial, said it frustrated him then to know that Milam and Bryant weren't likely to be punished.
Even though they "had taken a young boy's life and flaunted the fact that they had done it," the public knew nothing would happen, he said.
After Ware graduated from Valley, he came back to Greenwood and coached at Broad Street High School from 1957 to 1963. Back then, he said, the area was getting a great deal of bad publicity, and "folks were so embarrassed that they wouldn't even talk about Emmett Till."
Now that the investigation has been reopened, the retired college administrator said he considered it "providential" that a black district attorney, Joyce Chiles, will be deciding whether there is enough evidence to prosecute anyone still living who might have abetted Bryant and Milam.
The Ku Klux Klan, Ware said, had such great influence in the 1950s that "people were afraid to express views that might have been contrary to what the Klan supported." And he believes vestiges of that kind of thought are still around, here and elsewhere.
But, he said, if someone today contemplated killing a black person in a similar way, they "would have second thoughts, because they wouldn't have the immunity that Milam and Bryant knew they would have."
"I don't think the community would stand for it,
especially in the South - because it has seen what adverse publicity can do to a community," he said.
Greenwood Mayor Harry Smith said he has been contacted by media representatives from Scotland, Germany and other places as well as American outlets recently about the Till case.
Even those from far away have generally approached the story with curiosity, not in a judgmental way, he said. "I don't think much of it's done with malice," he said, adding that he believes those writers are motivated by "sincere interest."
As for his own memories, he said: "What I told them is that I was approximately the same age as Emmett Till when he was killed and I was living in Jackson 100 miles away. I knew it happened, but I didn't understand the significance of it."
Smith said he tries to explain that the killing didn't happen in Greenwood and that not everyone in the area should be tarred with the same brush for it. Instead, he hopes people will look at the progress that has been made in race relations.
"I would hope after 50 years that those here won't be blamed," he said.
Smith said some in the media have asked him whether such a killing could happen again. Any look at the national news will show that it could happen anywhere in the country, he said.
However, he said, if it did happen in this area, it would be harder to cover up because the community would react differently now than it did 50 years ago.
Suzy Gordon Johnson, executive director of the Greenwood Convention and Visitors Bureau, said many visitors and callers still express interest in sites related to the case, such as Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in Money.
That's where Till wolf-whistled at Bryant's wife, Carolyn - an act that ultimately led to the teenager's death.
Although Johnson said she's not advocating "tourist-izing" these sites important to the civil rights era, people do want to see them. She said there should at least be markers.
Johnson recalled that Dr. Susan Glisson of the William Winter Center for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi agreed with this idea. Glisson said this is especially important now because the people with firsthand knowledge of these events might not live much longer, Johnson said.
"She said, 'You've got to get out there and tell that story,'" Johnson said.
Some of the impact on the perception of the area is hard to gauge, such as the effect on industrial recruiting.
Robert Ingram, executive director of the Greenwood-Leflore Industrial Board, said he believes people outside the state generally don't hold the events of the past against Mississippians.
"Most people realize we've progressed greatly in race relations and Mississippi is not the same place it was in the '40s, '50s and even the '60s," he said.
If a company does its research, it should realize that although Mississippi isn't perfect, the perceptions associated with the Till case don't accurately reflect its people, Ingram said. And most people he deals with are intelligent enough to see that the state is trying to fix its problems.
In that respect, he said, the reopening of the Till case might actually help.
Ingram said current negative events and comments have more impact than those from decades ago. If people at a prospective business hear the wrong kind of criticism about a community from current leaders, "they'll walk away from you in a second," he said.
If people at a company ask questions about race relations here, he's confident that he can give satisfactory answers.
However, Ingram added, it's hard to say how many dismiss such a community immediately and never ask questions. "It's the ones that just disappear in the night that scare you," he said.
