Feds Revisit Civil Rights Murder

Black Teen's Body Exhumed 50 Years After He Was Slain In Miss.

(CBS/AP)  The Justice Department announced last year it would reopen an investigation into Till's slaying, saying it was triggered by several pieces of information including a documentary by New York filmmaker Keith Beauchamp.

CBS News' 60 Minutes reported last October that the new investigation was based on evidence suggesting that more than a dozen people may have been involved in the murder of Till, and that at least five of them are still alive. Those five could face criminal prosecution.

Till, who was raised in Chicago, was abducted from his uncle's home in the tiny Mississippi Delta community of Money on Aug. 28, 1955, reportedly for whistling at a white woman. His mutilated body was found by fishermen three days later in the Tallahatchie River.

Till's mother insisted that her son's body be displayed in an open casket at his funeral, forcing the nation to see the brutality directed at blacks in the South at the time. The slaying helped galvanize the civil rights movement.

Two white men charged with Till's murder — store owner Roy Bryant and his half brother J.W. Milam — were acquitted by an all-white jury but later confessed to Look magazine. They have since died.

The Till murder was immortalized in a 1963 Bob Dylan song "The Death of Emmett Till," which called the trial of Byrant and Milam "a mockery."

Other civil rights-era killings in Mississippi have been reopened with mixed results.

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted of the 1963 murder of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers. But there has been little progress in an effort to bring murder charges for the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Miss. Those killings were chronicled in the film "Mississippi Burning."