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“THE MURDER OF EMMETT TILL” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2890-H2891 on May 12, 2004.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE MURDER OF EMMETT TILL
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Rush) is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. RUSH. Mr. Speaker, I rise this evening to speak on the Justice Department's recently announced initiative to partner with the State of Mississippi in investigating the brutal murder of Emmett Till in the sham Jim Crow trial that subsequently acquitted the perpetuators of this heinous crime.
Given the significance of this tragedy in American history, I accepted the Justice Department's announcement with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I felt relief. But on the other hand, I thought to myself it is about time. This investigation should have been conducted at least 49 years ago.
On August 28, 1955, in Money, Mississippi, Roy Bryant and his half brother J.W. Milam kidnapped 14-year-old Emmett Till from his uncle's home where he was staying for the summer. Bryant and Milam brutally beat Emmett Till, took him to the edge of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, fastened a large metal fan used for ginning cotton to his neck with barbed wire, and pushed the body into the river. Emmett Till's body washed ashore some 3 days later.
Emmett's mother, Mamie Till, insisted on leaving her dead son's casket open at the funeral on the south side of Chicago. She did not let the coroner alter Emmett's deformed face, and for 3 days his casket lay open for anyone and for everyone to see. Photographs of Emmett's body were published in newspapers and magazines around the world. And after an all-white, all-male jury acquitted Bryant and Milam for the murder, the world became outraged.
Two years later, Milam and Bryant subsequently and candidly, and truthfully I might add, admitted their crime to Look Magazine and went into exact detail on how they committed their heinous crime.
A hundred days after the murder of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and the American civil rights movement was born. In the aftermath of the trial, Mamie Till begged the Justice Department and President Eisenhower to investigate her son's death, but her pleas were ignored.
Almost 50 years later, on February 10, 2004, I introduced a bipartisan congressional resolution, H. Con. Res. 360, calling upon the Justice Department to investigate the murder of Emmett Till and the sham trial that acquitted Bryant and Milam. Fifty-four Members of the House of Representatives, including the entire Congressional Black Caucus, cosponsored my resolution with the hopes that Ms. Mamie Till-
Mobley, who died in January of last year, could finally realize her profound wish that Emmett's murder be investigated. It is too bad that she is not alive today to see the commencement of this investigation.
The facts of this case are beyond dispute. The murder of Emmett Till has been the subject of numerous historical accounts, including a high-
profile documentary on PBS's ``American Experience'' series, a recently published book on Mamie Till-Mobley, and a yet-to-be-released documentary by a young African American film-maker who has been working on this project for some 9 years. Many of us regard the cruel and senseless tragedy of Emmett Till as the spark that ignited the civil rights movement. However, notwithstanding the facts in the history books, the official account of the murder of Emmett Till delineates Bryant and Milam as innocent men who were acquitted in a fair trial. Worse, it is still possible that other co-conspirators in this crime are still alive.
Mr. Speaker, I call upon the Justice Department to do a thorough job and leave no stone unturned. If there was official misconduct by Federal or local officials, they should not be immune to any possible prosecution. Not only was Emmett Till's senseless and savage murder a crime, but the subsequent official trial that freed Milam and Bryant was also a crime.
According to yesterday's edition of the Chicago Tribune, witnesses are now surfacing that suggest others may have been involved in the murder. Though Milam and Bryant were the two criminals on trial, some witnesses say they saw up to five men with flashlights and guns at the scene of the crime. It is important that the Justice Department investigate these possible leads and others as they go forward with Mississippi and county officials.
Bryant and Milam have since died, but justice is never too late. While we will never be able to erase this inhumane and cruel episode from the annals of American history, we can certainly set the record straight. Not only may coconspirators to the crime and trial still be alive, we can also have an official public account of what exactly happened. Reopening an investigation of a civil rights era murder is hardly unprecedented: the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, where four innocent young, black girls were killed are two cases upon which federal authorities reopened investigations resulting in arrests, prosecutions and convictions. Emmett Till deserves no less.
I call upon the Justice Department to do a thorough job and leave no stone unturned. If there was official misconduct by federal and/or local officials, they should not be immune to any possible prosecution. Not only was Emmett Till's senseless and savage murder a crime, but the subsequent official trial that freed Milam and Bryant was also a crime. Everyone and anyone who was involved in this criminal injustice should be fair game under a quality criminal investigation.
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