Confronting the past: as prosecutors take fresh looks at decades-old cases, Southern communities are being forced to revisit some of the most painful episodes of the civil rights era.

• Author: Lichtblau, Eric
• Position: National

On Aug. 28, 1955, in Money, Miss., a black teenager named Emmett Till was dragged from his bed in the middle of the night, beaten, shot in the head, and dropped in the Tallahatchie River. Till, a 14-year-old Chicagoan who was visiting relatives, may have made the fatal mistake of whistling at a white woman at a store a few days earlier.

Till's mother held a public funeral, and the acquittal of two white men in the crime by an all-white jury became a galvanizing moment of the civil rights movement. Now, 50 years later, prosecutors have decided to reopen the case, prompted by information uncovered by two filmmakers suggesting that people besides the two original suspects may have been involved in Till's death.

Some 120 miles away from Money, in the small city of Philadelphia, Miss., a new generation is asking for justice in another notorious civil rights era crime: the 1964 murders of three voting-rights activists by the Ku Klux Klan, an event chronicled in the film Mississippi Burning.

Decades after the era of sit-ins, segregation, and brutal lynchings, Money, Philadelphia, and other communities in the South are confronting the uncomfortable legacy of racial violence and intolerance that, until fairly recently, many thought had been relegated to the pages of history books, along with terms like Jim Crow and "whites only."

CIVIL RIGHTS MILESTONES

Places like Montgomery, Ala., the site of Rosa Parks's famous refusal to sit in the back of the bus in 1955, and institutions like the University of Mississippi, where a fierce integration battle took place in 1962, have in recent years examined and even embraced their roles in the battle for racial equality, building memorials and promoting sites associated with that era. Law-enforcement officials have also reopened the cases of the Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that killed tour black girls in 1963 and the murder that year of Mississippi civil rights advocate Medgar Evers, resulting in convictions in both cases.

"There's always been a sense of these things not having been put right, and I think a lot of people would like to see that happen," says Jimmy Thomas, managing editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, based at the University of Mississippi. "If we don't do it now, it may be too late."

Till's case, heavily covered by the media at the time, made a big impression on the nation, just as the modern civil rights movement was gathering steam. The image of his battered body in an open coffin at his funeral in Chicago was cited by civil rights advocates as an example of the brutality against blacks in the Deep South.

Testimony from witnesses at the time of Till's death linked two white men to the crime. But an all-white jury acquitted them in September 1955, after the defense made arguments that appealed to the jurors' white heritage. The men later gloated about the killing and provided gruesome details about the torture and murder to a magazine reporter. Both are now dead.

NEW EVIDENCE

But the stark images of Till continue to inspire strong feelings. Keith Beauchamp...