Will justice finally be done for Emmett Till? Family hope a 65-year wait may soon be over
Not a day has been spent in jail nor a penny paid in compensation for the brutal murder of a 14-year-old boy in Mississippi that helped spark the civil rights movement
by Ed Pilkington
Sat 25 Apr 2020 02.00 EDT
Last modified on Sat 25 Apr 2020 02.02 EDT
Thelma Wright Edwards knows this is the last chance for justice for Emmett Till. The next few weeks and months will determine whether there will ever be closure for her beloved cousin “Bobo”, as the family affectionately call the child.
The Guardian has learned that a reinvestigation of the boy’s murder that has been carried out by the FBI over the past three years could be wrapped up in weeks. For Thelma and the rest of the Till family, a decades-long struggle for justice is fast approaching its conclusion.
In August, it will be 65 years since the battered and bloated body of the 14-year-old Emmett Till was fished from the muddy waters of the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. His kidnapping, torture and murder on 28 August 1955 for having whistled at a white woman was a defining moment of postwar American history.
It set in train a sequence of events that led African Americans in the south to make an unprecedented stand, sparking the civil rights movement. Today his name is emblazoned on history books, memorialized in movies, while the glass-topped casket which tens of thousands of mourners walked by before his burial now stands as the centerpiece of the National Museum of African American history in Washington DC.
To Thelma Wright Edwards, 88, Emmett Till’s next of kin, he is more than a legend of history. He is the adored cousin who she remembers as a “mischievous peacemaker” forever devising pranks and cracking jokes.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/25/emmett-till-long-wait-for-justice?CMP=share_btn_tw
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