Prometheus 6

1. It's kind of old, kind of late in the day, and has (at best) only symbolic value
2. Get thier old, jive, moldy ancient decrepit asses up on the goddamn gallows like they did to Mr. Till

Mississippi is reliving a horrific murder that brought the state worldwide attention in the 1950's and served as a catalyst for the civil rights movement. If the Justice Department acts on what appears to be new evidence — and reopens the investigation into this unsolved killing — the country could yet learn the truth about the death of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a black boy who was brutally murdered for supposedly whistling at a white woman in 1955.

Emmett, who was visiting from Chicago, was abducted from a relative's house at gunpoint by two white men. His mutilated body was later found in the Tallahatchie River. Mississippi officials ordered the coffin sealed and tried to bury it quickly to keep pictures of the battered corpse out of the press. But Emmett's mother held an open-coffin funeral that drew international attention.

The two white men charged with abducting Emmett at gunpoint were predictably acquitted by an all-white jury. The trail had long since grown cold when a young documentarian named Keith Beauchamp started to make a film about the case in the mid-1990's. Mr. Beauchamp interviewed several potential witnesses, including one who was jailed in another city at the time of the trial to keep investigators from calling him to the stand. Backed by Emmett's relatives, Mr. Beauchamp now asserts that there were actually 10 people — several of them still alive — present at the murder. Family members and members of Congress are urging the federal government to investigate this case, just as it has several other civil rights murders that were committed decades ago but solved only recently.

Given the historical importance of this crime, the Justice Department should move forward to investigate even if the new evidence is less than a road map to sure conviction. There are still millions of people who are eager to know what happened to Emmett Till on that terrible night in Mississippi almost 50 years ago.