Abstract
Shortly before he was to have entered the eighth grade, [Emmett Louis Till] walked into a store in Money, a hamlet in the Mississippi Delta, and contrived a prank designed to impress his local cousins and their pals. He behaved suggestively toward Carolyn Bryant and may have wolf-whistled at the 21-year-old wife of the absent owner. Because of the breach of racial etiquette, Roy Bryant and his half- brother, J.W. Milam, both armed, soon thereafter abducted Till from the home of his relatives, pistol-whipped him, murdered him, and then dumped the corpse into the Tallahatchie River. Two recent documentaries - Stanley Nelson's "The Murder of Emmett Till" and Keith A. Beauchamp's "The Untold Story of Emmett Till" - have not only revived interest in the fate of the best-known young victim of racial violence in Southern history; both film-makers have also suggested that the number of killers was larger than two. Both Bryant and [Milam] have died. But the possibility that accomplices remain alive has now stimulated the Bush administration to weigh evidence that might lead to further prosecution under Mississippi law.