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Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.
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Scott Betz 2024 - © All Rights Reserved
"...It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake."
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress."
Frederick Douglas and Susan B. Anthony are buried in the same cemetery, Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, NY. They knew each other while they were still alive and agreed on some things but disagreed on others. I hope, as ghosts, they have come to terms with their differences and Douglass dances with Susan even as the wind howls restlessly through the graveyard.
These scans come from my rather large magazine collection. Instead of filling my house with old moldy magazines, I scanned them (in most cases, photographed them) and filled a storage area with moldy magazines. Now they reside on an external harddrive. I thought others might appreciate these tidbits of forgotten history.
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Enjoy!
From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.
Select the image of the magnifying glass right above the image to the right, on the subsequent webpage, select "All Sizes," and finally on the last webpage select "Original Size" to read an article or to see the image clearly.
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I saw that they are using this at the protests in LA, and wanted to make an image for myself... I am done laying down and taking it. Give me my rights!!
If you have a problem with gay people, then I HAVE A PROBLEM WITH YOU!
And don't forget, it isn't just Prop 8; there were similar propositions passed in other (Arizona and Florida) states, including a provision that outlaws gay people from adopting children in Arkansas. This outcry of bigotry is just sickening, and must be stopped.
Thousands of Californians gathered on the steps of the State Capitol Building in Sacramento to protest Prop. 8, the anti-gay marriage amendment.
When I heard Mareeyo McGhee say he had been "dreaming and praying" that Joe Biden would win the 2020 Presidential Race, my mind raced to memories of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, and to John Lewis crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday. As I stood there I thought that surely Martin Luther King and John Lewis were looking down on Mareeyo and saying, "keep dreaming, keep praying, keep on, little fella". Because that's exactly what I was thinking.
Indianapolis
2020
© James Rice, All Rights Reserved
Give your heart to justice, give your love George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, Cop Lives Matter, Forgiveness matters Orlando Fl 6/8/20
Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcome X
Dr. King's philosophy was one of non-violence, and this article looks at the alternative views of Malcolm X which are not aired quite so frequently.
Dr. King is probably remembered as the most famous African-American leader in US history. At the time of his assassination in 1968 he was at the forefront of the civil rights movement in the US. He left behind him a legacy of committed, non-violent resistance to an unjust system. But perhaps his greatest legacy is his aspiration for a future in which racial division would be a thing of the past: his famous dream.
But there were limits to the effectiveness of King’s philosophy. His approach was essentially what theorist Robert Cox would call a ‘problem solving’ approach - in other words, King seemed to be trying to work for change within an existing system for most of his life. Another 1960s black leader whose ideas presented more of a challenge to the existing structures of US society:
Malcolm X. He was similarly assassinated three years before Martin Luther King. Although his approach to the problem of institutional racism in America was an essential component of the civil rights struggle, we hear much less about his ideas.
Whenever Malcom X is brought up it is first necessary to dispense with the inevitable accusations: yes, Malcom X was - for a time - a so-called ‘racist in reverse’. He once believed in an exclusionary form of Islam, believing that the white man was the devil. This did not refer to some white people, or to most white people, but to ALL white people.
But Malcolm X changed his views on that score. Indeed, his entire life was marked by his willingness to alter his views. He made many remarkable changes throughout his life, moving from a life of armed robbery, gambling, and dealing in cocaine and marijuana to an ascetic life as a devout Muslim. And by the time of his return from visiting Mecca in 1964, he had changed his views on white people. His travels through the Middle East and Africa had led him to learn the error of his racist views of whites. In a dramatic turnaround, he wrote an open letter for distribution to the press in which he rejected his earlier racism.
He still believed in his struggle to fight for the emancipation of his race, but no longer believed that all white people were his enemies.
Of course, the reality of 1960s North America was that many whites were the enemies of black people. And both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were struggling to change the situation, so that African-Americans would not continue to be the victims of America.
Their methods and views were very different. Dr. King was a Christian minister, whereas Malcolm X not only became a Muslim in a jailhouse conversion, but had a history of hostility towards Christianity. One of the most powerful images in Spike Lee’s biopic of Malcolm X is of Denzel Washington, as Malcolm, arguing in jail about the colour of Jesus’ skin. He was arguing that Jesus was born in a part of the world where the indigenous population had historically been ‘people of colour’.
He later moderated his criticism of Christianity, and was willing to work alongside black Christian leaders, but - similar to a Marxist view of religion - he always felt that black people in America had been kept passive by Christianity since the time of slavery. They would tolerate hell in the present because of the promise of heaven in the hereafter.
One of the most interesting differences between the philosophies of the two men, and one which is pertinent today given the imminent 1916 celebrations, is their attitude to violence. Martin Luther King espoused a ‘turn the other cheek’ philosophy, whereas Malcolm X had a philosophy of “vigorous action in self defence”. These two philosophies were juxtaposed in another Spike Lee film, ‘Do the Right Thing‘, which finishes with a quote from each man.
However, Malcolm X did not believe in violence in all crcumstances, and generally spoke about violence as a defensive mechanism rather than as aggression. He suggested that black people should form rifle clubs. It should be remembered that gun ownership was entirely legal, and that this was in a context where the Ku Klux Klan were very active, and civil rights legislation had yet to be enacted.
On one occasion, he advocated self defence after seeing television footage from Alabama of Martin Luther King being knocked down by a racist. He sent a message to Lincoln Rockwell, one of the white supremacist agitators in Alabama and the leader of the American Nazi Party, warning him that if these racist attacks continued they would be met with “maximum physical retaliation”. His philosophy was not motivated by hate, but by ‘intelligence’. He believed that self-defence was morally justified, and also cited hypocrisy of the US drafting black men to be violent in its army, but then condemning them for being ready to defend themselves in a just cause at home:
"They're violent in Korea, they're violent in Germany, they're violent in the south Pacific, they're violent in Cuba, they're violent wherever they go. But when it comes time for you and me to protect ourselves against lynchings, they tell us to be nonviolent" (Detroit, Feb 14th 1965 - 8 days before his death).
It is important to remember, as noted in Malcolm’s eulogy by actor Ossie Davis, that Malcolm X was never personally associated with any violence himself. His view was that a black population that was willing to defend itself would make for a more peaceful society, as they would be less likely to be the victims of attack. It was also clear that the government was failing to protect the black community, and Malcolm X believed that a proactive African-American policy of self defence would force the government to step in and do its job.
Malcolm X saw the futility of trying to change the system from within, and in appealling to the government for change. He believed in taking action to improve circumstances of discrimination or oppression. He spoke about a 'do it yourself philosophy, a do it right now philosophy, an it's already too late philosophy'. He knew that African-American people could not achieve fairness in the system of the time, and this was the reason for his militancy and urgency. But he was also conscious that his militancy would make the more moderate path of Martin Luther King appear more acceptable in comparison. At a speech in Jan/Feb 1965 in Selma, Alabama, where King was in jail, Malcolm X spoke at a rally and sat beside King's wife on the podium. Dr. King's wife told ‘Jet’ magazine that Malcolm X told her that he "wanted to present an alternative; that it mght be easier for whites to accept Martin's proposals after hearing him (Malcolm X)... He seemed rather anxious to let Martin know that he was ...trying to make it easier [for him]" (cited in Alex Haley's introduction to The Autobiography of Malcolm X). So in his militancy, Malcolm X was also consciously attempting to open up a space for more moderate voices to be heard.
Malcolm X's approach was an essential component of the civil rights struggle, and I believe that his commitment, his militancy, and his unwillingness to compromise or be co-opted mean that his ideas have far more emancipatory potential than those of Martin Luther King.
Malcolm X died while his ideas were still developing - who knows what solutions he would have come up with if he had been allowed to live?
This portion of the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial includes a quote from Justice Thurgood Marshall. It stands on the opposite side of the sculpture in my previous posting. The memorial, designed by sculptor Stanley Bleifeld, stands on the grounds of the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond. Information from the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial website.
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Moon Rising over FDU at Dr. Martin Luther King Park in Hackensack, NJ
Sculptor Richard Blake
Lancaster, PA
#MLK #martinlutherkingjr #Nikon #nikonphotography #moon #MoonRise #civilrights #hackensack #nj #NewJersey
#FDU #statue
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Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr
Lincoln Memorial Washington, DC
August 28, 1963
“…And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.
And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that:
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring
And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
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During my 2016 annual spring trip to Florida, both going and coming back, I made several stops along the "Civil Rights Trail"--this one in Birmingham, Alabama. This is the 16th Street Baptist Church--a center of the civil rights movement in the late 50's/60's. This is where white supremacists planted a bomb which killed four little girls and nearly killed another.
It was pretty dark by the time I took this, darker than appears here, and the resolution ain't what I'd like.
When I first uploaded this, I carelessly referred to the church as the "Ebenezer Baptist," which it most definitely is not. That church is in Atlanta.
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Statue of Harriet Tubman, the American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some thirteen missions to rescue approximately seventy enslaved people, family and friends.
This statue is at the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center near Cambridge, Maryland (USA).
North Baltimore, Maryland, Sunday April 19, 2015. Around one hundred activists associated with Justice League NYC and other civil rights groups marched down historic US Route 1 through Baltimore as participants in an event named #MARCH2JUSTICE. On April 13, 2015, the activists gathered in New York CIty to embark on a 250 mile march through five states to culminate in a rally on the National Mall near the US Capitol on Tuesday, April 21. The marchers intend to deliver to Congress a "Justice Package" of criminal justice reform legislation and other demands to end police brutality and empower youth.
Postscript 1. As the march moved through the streets of Baltimore young Freddie Gray lie nearby in a hospital bed, his life slipping away, yet another young African-American victim of police violence. Freddie passed the next day. Angry crowds are filling the streets in protest. Hopefully the anger will be expressed non-violently and directed where it belongs; against the corrupt and ineffectual city and state government, the notoriously brutal Baltimore Police department and the corporate capitalist thieves who plundered, poisoned and abandoned this city. But this was not to be.
On Saturday April 25 after a peaceful daytime march by a diverse crowd of over 2,000 social justice activists and supporters, rioting and looting erupted in the evening, provoking a predictably violent police response.
Sunday was mostly chill and respectful of the Gray family's call for peace and justice for Freddie as the Baltimore Police Department's investigation of his killing by BPD officers went forward.
What actually happened here? A young African-American man was arrested by the police for no apparent good reason and ended up dead from spinal cord injury sustained while in custody. Freddie was manhandled by cops, subjected to a paddy wagon ride intended to injure him further and denied the prompt medical care he begged for.
On Monday April 27 after Freddie Gray's funeral, all hell broke loose. In "Charm City" there are now numerous spectacular arson fires, looting of business establishments large and small, occasional gunplay, nearly olympic feats of hateful projectile hurling against the police, burning of police and civilian automobiles, tear gas and other chemical weapon retaliation by cops and other assorted mayhem. They don't call this place Mobtown for nothing and, tragically, the violence is as American as cherry pie. It should be noted that dozens of members of the faith community including the Nation Of Islam and other good samaritans were on the street all night trying to wage peace. The mayor has announced a 10 PM to 5AM curfew for Tuesday and beyond. Let's hope that the violence is over.
Postscript 2. On May 1, 2015 five of the six police officers who killed Freddie Gray were charged with homicide. The driver of the police paddy wagon was charged with second degree "depraved heart" murder, meaning that the State asserts that the killing was intentional. Four of the other five officers are charged with manslaughter and all were charged variously with other violations including false imprisonment and misconduct in office,
Trikosko, Marion S.,, photographer.
Martin Luther King press conference
1964 Mar. 26.
1 negative : film.
Notes:
Title from contact sheet folder caption.
U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection.
Photograph shows head-and-shoulders portrait of King leaning on a lectern.
Subjects:
King, Martin Luther,--Jr.,--1929-1968--Public appearances.
Format: Film negatives--1960-1970.
Portrait photographs--1960-1970.
Rights Info: No known restrictions on publication.
Repository: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
Higher resolution image is available (Persistent URL): hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsc.01269
Call Number: LC-U9- 11696-9A
Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was a fourteen year old African-American from Chicago, Illinois brutally murdered [1] in Money, Mississippi, a small town in the state's Delta region. The murder of Emmett Till was noted as one of the leading events that motivated the nascent American Civil Rights Movement.[1] The main suspects were acquitted, but later admitted to committing the crime.
Till's mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket to let everyone see how he had been brutally killed. He had been brutally beaten and had his eye gouged out before he was shot through the head and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a 75-pound cotton gin fan tied to his neck as a weight with barbed wire. His body stayed in the river for three days until it was discovered and retrieved by two fishermen.
Till's body resides in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. The murder case was officially reopened in May 2004, and as a part of the investigation the body was exhumed so an autopsy could be performed. The body was reburied by the family in the same location later that week.
Background
Emmett Till was the son of Mamie Till and Louis Till. Emmett's mother was born to John and Alma Carthan in the small Delta town of Webb, Mississippi ("the Delta" being the traditional name for the area of northwestern Mississippi, at the confluence of the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers). When she was two years old, her family moved to Illinois. Emmett's mother largely raised him on her own; she and Louis Till had separated in 1942.
Emmett's father, Louis Till, was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943. While serving in Italy, he was convicted of raping two women and killing a third. He was executed by the Army by hanging near Pisa in July 1945.[5][6] Before Emmett Till's killing, the Till family knew none of this, only that Louis had been killed due to "willful misconduct". The facts of Louis Till's execution were only made widely known after Emmett Till's death, by segregationist senator James Eastland, in an apparent attempt to turn public support away from Mrs. Till just weeks before the trials of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the implication being that criminal behavior ran in the Till family
Events
In 1955, Till and his cousin were sent for a summer stay with Till's great-uncle, Moses Wright,[ who lived in Money, Mississippi (another small town in the Delta, eight miles north of Greenwood).
Before his departure for the Delta, Till's mother cautioned him to "mind his manners" with white people.
Till's mother understood that race relations in Mississippi were very different from those in Chicago. The state had seen many lynchings during the South's lynching era (ca. 1876-1930), and racially motivated murders were still not unfamiliar, especially in the Delta region where Till was going to visit. Racial tensions were also on the rise after the United States Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end segregation in public education.
Till arrived on August 21. On August 24, he joined other young teenagers as they went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to get some candy and soda. The teens were children of sharecroppers and had been picking cotton all day. The market was owned by a husband and wife, Roy Bryant and Carolyn Bryant, and mostly catered to the local sharecropper population. Till's cousin and several black youths, all under 16, were with Till in the store. Till had shown them photos of his life back home, including one of him with his friends and girlfriend, a white girl. The boys didn't believe that he had a white girlfriend and dared him to talk to a white woman in the shop.
As Till was leaving the store, he said "Bye, baby," to Carolyn Bryant, a married white woman.[10] She stood up and stormed to her car. The boys were terrified thinking she might return with a pistol and ran away. The news of this greatly angered her husband when he heard of it upon his return from out of town a few days later.
Till's cousin, Wheeler Parker, Jr., who was with him at the store, claims Till did nothing but whistle at the woman. "He loved pranks, he loved fun, he loved jokes ... in Mississippi, people didn't think the same jokes were funny." Carolyn Bryant later asserted that Till had grabbed her at the waist and asked her for a date. She said the young man also used "unprintable" words. He had a slight stutter and some have conjectured that Bryant might have misinterpreted what Till said.
By the time 24-year-old Roy Bryant returned from a road trip three days after his wife’s encounter with Till, it seemed that everyone in Tallahatchie County had heard about the incident, in every conceivable version. Bryant decided that he and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, 36, would meet at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday to "teach the boy a lesson."
This was also in the book "Mississippi trial, 1955" by: Chris Crowe.
Murder
At about 12:30 a.m. on August 28, Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, came in a car with two unknown people in the back, and kidnapped Emmett Till from his great-uncle's house in the middle of the night. According to witnesses, they drove him to a weathered shed on a plantation in neighboring Sunflower County, where they brutally beat and then shot him. The fan around his neck was to weigh down his body with some barbed wire to hold it on, which they dropped into the Tallahatchie River near Glendora, another small cotton town, north of Money.
The brothers and police tried to convince the people that Emmett Till was in Chicago and that the beaten boy was someone else, but the only way that he was recognized was by the ring on his finger that had been his father's. His mother had given it to him the day before he left for Money. The brothers were soon under official suspicion for the boy's disappearance and were arrested August 29 after spending the night with relatives in Ruleville, just miles away from the scene of the crime.
Both men admitted they had taken the boy from his great-uncle's yard but claimed they turned him loose the same night. Word got out that Till was missing and soon NAACP civil rights leader Medgar Evers, the state field secretary, and Amzie Moore, head of the Bolivar County chapter, became involved, disguising themselves as cotton pickers and going into the cotton fields in search of any information that would help find the young visitor from Chicago.
Some supposed that relatives of Till were hiding him out of fear for the youth’s safety or that he had been sent back to Chicago where he would be safe.
Moses Wright, a witness to Till's abduction told the Sheriff that a person who sounded like a woman had identified Till as "the one" after which the men had driven away with him. Bryant and Milam claimed they later found out Till was not "the one" who allegedly insulted Mrs. Bryant, and swore to Sheriff George Smith they had released him. They would later recant and confess after their acquittal.
In an editorial on Friday, September 2, Greenville journalist Hodding Carter, Jr. asserted that "people who are guilty of this savage crime should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," a brave suggestion for any Mississippi newspaper editor to make at the time.
Funeral
After Till's disfigured body was found, he was put into a pine box and nearly buried, but Mamie Till wanted the body to come back to Chicago. A Tutwiler mortuary assistant worked all night to prepare the body as best he could so that Mamie Till could bring Emmett's body back to Chicago.
The Chicago funeral home had agreed not to open the casket, but Mamie Till fought it, and after the state of Mississippi would not allow the funeral home to open it, Mamie threatened to open it herself, insisting she had a right to see her son. After viewing the body, she also insisted on leaving the casket open for the funeral and allowing people to take photos because she wanted people to see how badly Till's body had been disfigured. News photographs of Till's mutilated corpse circulated around the country, notably appearing in Jet magazine, drawing intense public reaction. Some reports indicate up to 50,000 people viewed the body.
Emmett Till was buried September 6 in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. The same day, Bryant and Milam were indicted by a grand jury.
Trial
When Mamie Till came to Mississippi to testify at the trial, she stayed in the home of Dr. T.R.M. Howard in the all-black town of Mound Bayou. Others staying in Howard's home were black reporters, such as Cloyte Murdock of Ebony Magazine, key witnesses, and Congressman Charles Diggs of Michigan, the first chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. Howard was a major civil rights leader and fraternal organization official in Mississippi, the head of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), and one of the wealthiest blacks in the state.
On the day before the trial, Frank Young, a black farm worker, came to Howard's home. He said that he had information indicating that Milam and Bryant had help in their crime. Young's allegations sparked an investigation that led to unprecedented cooperation between local law enforcement, the NAACP, the RCNL, black journalists, and local reporters. The trial began on September 19. Moses Wright, Emmett's great-uncle, was one of the main witnesses called up to speak. Pointing to one of the suspected killers, he said "Dar he," to refer to the man who had killed his nephew.
Another key witness for the prosecution was Willie Reed, an 18-year-old high school student who lived on a plantation near Drew, Mississippi in Sunflower County. The prosecution had located him because of the investigation sparked by Young's information. Reed testified that he had seen a pickup truck outside of an equipment shed on a plantation near Drew managed by Leslie Milam, a brother of J.W. and Roy Bryant. He said that four whites, including J.W. Milam, were in the cab and three blacks were in the back, one of them Till. When the truck pulled into the shed, he heard human cries that sounded like a beating was underway. He did not identify the other blacks on the truck.
On September 23 the all-white jury, made up of 12 males, acquitted both defendants. Deliberations took just 67 minutes; one juror said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long."[10] The hasty acquittal outraged people throughout the United States and Europe and energized the nascent Civil Rights Movement.
Aftermath of the trial
Even during the trial, Howard and black journalists such as James Hicks of the Baltimore Afro-American named several blacks who had allegedly been on the truck near Drew including three employees of J.W. Milam: Henry Lee Loggins, Levi 'Too-Tight' Collins, and Joe Willie Hubbard. In the months after the trial, both Hicks and Howard called for a federal investigation into charges that Sheriff H.C. Strider had locked up Collins and Loggins in jail to keep them from testifying.
In a January 1956 article in Look Magazine for which they were paid $4,000, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant admitted to journalist William Bradford Huie that he and his brother had killed Till. They did not fear being tried again for the same crime because of the Constitutional double jeopardy protection. Milam claimed that initially their intention was to scare Till into line by pistol-whipping him and threatening to throw him off a cliff. Milam claimed that regardless of what they did to Till, he never showed any fear, never seemed to believe they would really kill him, and maintained a completely unrepentant, insolent, and defiant attitude towards them concerning his actions. Thus the brothers said they felt they were left with no choice but to fully make an example of Till. The story focused exclusively on the role of Milam and Bryant in the crime and did not mention the possible part played by others in the crime.
In February 1956 Howard's version of events of the kidnapping and murder, which stressed the possible involvement of Hubbard and Loggins, appeared in the booklet Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till by Olive Arnold Adams. At the same time a still unidentified white reporter using the pseudonym Amos Dixon wrote a series of articles in the California Eagle. The series put forward essentially the same thesis as Time Bomb but offered a more detailed description of the possible role of Loggins, Hubbard, Collins, and Leslie Milam. Time Bomb and Dixon's articles had no lasting impact in the shaping of public opinion. Huie's article became the most commonly accepted version of events.
In 1957 Huie returned to the story for Look Magazine in an article which indicated that local residents were shunning Milam and Bryant and that their stores were closed due to a lack of business.
Milam died of cancer in 1980 and Bryant died of cancer in 1994. The men never expressed any remorse for Till's death and seemed to feel that they had done no wrong. In fact, a few months before he died, Bryant complained bitterly in an interview that he had never made as much money off Till's death as he deserved and that it had ruined his life[11]. Mamie (as Mamie Till Mobley) outlived them, dying at the age of 81 on January 6, 2003. That same year her autobiography Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (One World Books, co-written with Christopher Benson) was published.
In 1991, a seven-mile stretch of 71st street in Chicago was renamed "Emmett Till Road," after the slain boy. In 2006 a Mississippi historical marker marking the place of Till's death was defaced, and in August 2007 it went missing. Less than a week later a replica was put up in its place.
Recent investigations
In 2001, David T. Beito, associate professor at the University of Alabama and Linda Royster Beito, chair of the department of social sciences at Stillman College, were the first investigators in many decades to track down and interview on tape two key principals in the case: Henry Lee Loggins and Willie Reed. They were doing research for their biography of T.R.M. Howard. In his interview with the Beitos, Loggins denied that he had any knowledge of the crime or that he was one of the black men on the truck outside of the equipment shed near Drew. Reed repeated his testimony at the trial that he had seen three black men and four white men (including J.W. Milam) on the truck. When asked to identify the black men, however, he did not name Loggins as one of them. The Beitos also confirmed that Levi 'Too-Tight' Collins, another black man allegedly on this car, had died in 1993.
In 1996, Keith Beauchamp started background research for a feature film he planned to make about Till's murder, and asserted that as many as 14 individuals may have been involved. While conducting interviews he also encountered eyewitnesses who had never spoken out publicly before. As a result he decided to produce a documentary instead, and spent the next nine years creating The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. The film led to calls by the NAACP and others for the case to be reopened. The documentary included lengthy interviews with Loggins and Reed, both of whom the Beitos had first tracked down and interviewed in 2001. Loggins repeated his denial of any knowledge of the crime. Beauchamp has consistently refused to name the fourteen individuals who he asserts took part in the crime, including the five who he claims are still alive.
On May 10, 2004, the United States Department of Justice announced that it was reopening the case to determine whether anyone other than Milam and Bryant was involved. Although the statute of limitations prevented charges being pursued under federal law, they could be pursued before the state court, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and officials in Mississippi worked jointly on the investigation. As no autopsy had been performed on Till's body, it was exhumed on May 31, 2005 from the suburban Chicago cemetery where it was buried, and the Cook County coroner then conducted the autopsy. The body was reburied by relatives on June 4. It has been positively identified as that of Emmett Till.
In February 2007, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported that both the FBI and a Leflore County Grand Jury, which was empaneled by Joyce Chiles, a black prosecutor, had found no credible basis for Keith Beauchamp's claim that 14 individuals took part in Till's abduction and murder or that any are still alive. The Grand Jury also decided not to pursue charges against Carolyn Bryant Donham, Roy Bryant's ex wife. Neither the FBI nor the Grand Jury found any credible evidence that Henry Lee Loggins, now living in an Ohio nursing home, and identified by Beauchamp as a suspect who could be charged, had any role in the crime. Other than Loggins, Beauchamp still refuses to name the 14 people who he says were involved although the FBI and District Attorney have completed their investigations of his charges and he is free to go on the record. A story by Jerry Mitchell in the Clarion-Ledger on February 18 describes Beauchamp's allegation that 14 or more were involved as a legend.
The same article also labels as legend a rumor that Till had endured castration at the hands of his victimizers. The castration theory was first put forward uncritically in Beauchamp's "Untold Story" although Mamie Till-Mobley (Emmett's mother) had said in an earlier documentary directed by Stanley Nelson, "The Murder of Emmett Till," (2003) that her son's genitals were intact when she examined the corpse. The recent autopsy, as reported by Mitchell, confirmed Mobley-Till's original account and showed no evidence of castration.
In March 2007, Till's family was briefed by the FBI on the contents of its investigation. The FBI report released on March 29, 2007 found that Till died of a gunshot wound to the head and that he had broken wrist bones and skull and leg fractures.
Greensboro Four
The Greensboro Four were four young Black men who staged the first sit-in at Greensboro: Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil. All four were students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College. On February 1, 1960, the four students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, where the official policy was to refuse service to anyone but whites. Denied service, the four young men refused to give up their seats.
Police arrived on the scene but were unable to take action due to the lack of provocation. By that time, Johns had already alerted the local media, who had arrived in full force to cover the events on television. The Greensboro Four stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with more students from local colleges.
They were influenced by the nonviolent protest techniques practiced by Mohandas Gandhi, as well as the Freedom Rides organized by the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) in 1947, in which interracial activists rode across the South in buses to test a recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation in interstate bus travel.