True

In November 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that it had concluded its 18-month investigation into the reopened case of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. This internationally known case involved a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was abducted from his bed at gunpoint in the middle of the night. Three days later, a boy on a fishing trip in the Tallahatchie River found Till’s corpse—battered, mutilated, shot, and weighed down with a 75-pound cotton gin fan. Based on eyewitness testimony about Till’s abduction and an identification of his body by his uncle and mother, Tallahatchie County tried two local white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, for the murder. After five days of trial, a jury of 12 white men deliberated for 67 minutes and voted to acquit. Shortly thereafter, the freed Bryant and Milam sold their “confession” to the murder—in the form of a detailed, gloating testimonial—to Look magazine for $4,000.
A more complex set of reasons for the reopening stems from the emblematic significance of the case itself. In announcing the involvement of federal prosecutors, Assistant Attorney General R. Alexander Acosta noted, “The Emmett Till case stands at the heart of the American civil rights movement. This brutal murder and grotesque miscarriage of justice outraged a nation and helped galvanize support for the modern American civil rights movement. We owe it to Emmett Till, and we owe it to ourselves, to see whether after all these years, some additional measure of justice remains possible.” While some have questioned the timing and motivations of the Justice Department’s proclamation, there is no disagreement with its assessment of the historic consequence of the death of Emmett Till. Till’s murder is one of the most infamous acts of racial violence in the history of the United States; it profoundly changed the scope of racial discourse in ways that still resonate throughout American...