50 Years After the Murder of Emmett Till, the Investigation Continues

On August 28th, 1955, fifty years ago this Sunday, Emmett Till was abducted, beaten and shot near Money, Mississippi after he allegedly whistled at a white female store clerk. The clerk's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury. The two later confessed to beating and shooting Till in a magazine article. Both men have since died.

On June 1st of this year, 50 years after Emmett Till's mutilated body was found in a Mississippi river, federal investigators unearthed the teen's casket in search of clues in a murder case that helped kindle the civil rights movement. Mississippi prosecutors and the FBI have said DNA or other evidence might help determine who killed the 14 year-old and whether anyone still alive should be prosecuted.

The U.S. Justice Department announced last year it would reopen an investigation into Emmett Till's slaying. They said the move was triggered by several pieces of information including a documentary by filmmaker Keith Beauchamp.

• "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till", excerpt of documentary by filmmaker Keith Beauchamp.
• Keith Beauchamp, joins us in our firehouse studio.
• Clenora Hudson-Weems, Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia and author of the book "Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement."

AMY GOODMAN: Keith [Beauchamp] joins us in the studio and we’ll talk to him, as well as a professor who has been investigating this case. But we first go to an excerpt of his film, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. This is Mamie Till Mobley, Emmett’s mother, describing the first time she saw Emmett's corpse. {mosgoogle right}

MAMIE TILL MOBLEY: My father was on one side of me, and Rayfield Mooty was on the other side of me, and Gene was at my back. And I shrugged them. I said, “Turn me loose. I’ve got a job to do, and I don't have time to be fainting now.” I saw his tongue had been choked out and it was lying down on his chin. I saw that this eye was out, and it was lying about midway to cheek. I looked at this eye, and it was gone. I looked at the bridge of his nose, and it looked like someone had taken a meat chopper and chopped it. I looked at his teeth, because I took so much pride in his teeth. His teeth were the prettiest things I’d ever seen in my life, I thought. And I only saw two. Where are the rest of them? They had just been knocked out. And I was looking at his ears. His ears were like mine. They curled. They're not attached, and they curled up the same way mine are. And I didn't see the ear. Where's the ear? And that's when I discovered a hole about here, and I could see daylight on the other side. I said, now was it necessary to shoot him? If that's a bullet hole, was that necessary? And I also discovered that they had taken an axe, and they had gone straight down across his head, and the face and the back of the head were separate.

Well, I looked at Mr. Rayner, and Mr. Rayner wanted to know, was I going to have the casket opened? I said, “Oh, yes, we're going to open the casket.” He said, “Well, Ms. Bradley, do you want me to do something for the face? Want me to try to fix it up?” I said, “No. Let the people see what I have seen.” I said, “I want the world to see this, because there's no way I can tell this story and give them the visual picture of what my son looked like.”

REV. AL SHARPTON: The easiest thing would have been to say, “No, close the casket. I can’t bear it.” But she somewhere found the strength to say, ‘I’ll bear my pain to save some other mother from having to go through this,’ and because she put the picture of this young man's body on the conscience of America, she might have saved thousands of young black men and young black women's lives.

AMY GOODMAN: That was an excerpt of the film, The Untold Story of Emmett Till. That was Reverend Al Sharpton talking about Mamie Till Mobley's decision to have an open casket. We turn now to Keith Beauchamp, the filmmaker, after this break. 

 On this 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till, we turn to Keith Beauchamp, the filmmaker of The Untold Story of Emmett Till, which has just come out and will be released nationally in the coming months. On the line with us, we are joined by Clenora Hudson-Weems, Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and author of the book, Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement. First, though, to Keith Beauchamp. The information you uncovered that has reopened this case, talk about it.

KEITH BEAUCHAMP: Well, through my research while trying to produce the film, I came across information that up to 14 people was involved with the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till. Five of these people were black men. We believe that they were forced to participate because they were employees to J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, as well as a number of their friends. Right now I believe and I have been standing by this for the whole time and which is why the investigation is open at this point is because I believe that there’s five people who can be indicted and charged for the kidnapping and murder today.

AMY GOODMAN: Clenora Weems, your response.

CLENORA HUDSON-WEEMS: As to what? Why it’s being reopened?

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of the case, of it being reopened and of what Keith Beauchamp has uncovered?

CLENORA HUDSON-WEEMS: Well, first of all, I don't think Keith Beauchamp has discovered or uncovered anything. I started working on this 20 years ago. I was a Ford Fellow at the University of Iowa, and I established Till as the catalyst of the Civil Rights Movement, which a lot of my colleagues in the academy across the nation have endorsed, because of the fact that it was very difficult in 1985-86 when I went to my dissertation committee and told them that I was going to, instead of writing on black women writers, having been contracted to do the first book on Toni Morrison, I wanted to write on Emmett Till as the catalyst, and it was a very difficult thing, because it had already been established --

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Hudson-Weems, I was just wondering if you could speak louder.

CLENORA HUDSON-WEEMS: Can you hear me now?

AMY GOODMAN: That’s much better. As loud as you possibly can.

CLENORA HUDSON-WEEMS: Okay, thank you. Yes, what I was saying is that basically I can't see very much of anything being established in the process of reopening the case as such, because I think that my 1988 Ford doctorate dissertation which was entitled "Emmett Till: The Impetus of the Modern Civil Rights Movement," which later became my book, which I had published this 1994 -- that was exactly my book -- that, in fact, all of the facts that I had put in that book of showing that Emmett Till’s lynching, which occurred three days and three months prior to Rosa Parks, was in fact the catalyst, and I have spoken in and out of this country on that for the last 20 years. I had talked about one particular black guy who was there in the first chapter of my book, and that was “Too Tight” Collins, who was forced to identify Emmett Till.