Emmett Till

FBI: No Federal Charges in Till Killing JACKSON, Miss. - The FBI said Thursday that no federal charges will be filed in the grisly 1955 killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a case that helped galvanize the civil rights movement. … Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Mississippi in August 1955 when he was beaten and shot, purportedly for whistling at a white woman. His battered body, weighted down with a cotton-gin fan around his neck, was pulled from the Tallahatchie River a few days later. The boy's mother held an open-casket funeral, and a photo of Till's disfigured face let the world see what was happening in the South. In 1955, an all-white jury acquitted two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milan, who later confessed to the killing in a magazine interview. They have since died. The Justice Department reopened the case last year, prompted by meetings with a documentary filmmaker who claimed to have found investigative errors and who concluded that some people still living were involved in the crime. Before 1994, all federal criminal civil rights violations carried a five-year statute of limitations, even in cases involving death. In 1994, the law was amended to provide the death penalty in such cases, but the law cannot be applied retroactively, said FBI spokeswoman Deborah Madden. The FBI's Raucci said the bureau would have no further comment on what is now a state case. Till's family said it had not expected any federal charges, so the news did not come as a disappointment. … In recent years, law enforcement authorities have been trying to complete unfinished business from the civil rights era. In 1994, Mississippi won the conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 sniper killing of NAACP leader Medgar Evers. In Alabama, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in 2002 of killing four black girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963. In 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted. And Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman, was convicted last June of manslaughter in the killings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964. -------- The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan, 1963