Stephen Whitfield

Not until after his bar mitzvah did [Marc Chagall] change his first name from Moshe, the name of the liberator from Egyptian bondage. But in depicting [Jesus] in so transformative a setting as The White Crucifixion, Chagall made from the seasonal overlapping of Passover and Easter a painting that manages to blend his flair for summoning beauty with the giftof tragic depth. Instead of a loincloth covering the otherwise naked Savior, he is wrapped in a tallis. Surrounding him is not the jeering mob that medieval painters sometimes portrayed, but instead the inhabitants of the shtetl. Instead of the pastoral charm that Chagall characteristically evoked, there is chaos, with an atmosphere of terror and flight enveloping those fragile Torah scrolls. The palette of the White Crucifixion is recognizably Chagall's, but the brightest color in this painting is flameorange; and a Nazi thug, wearing an armband, is burning down a synagogue. Here was a portent of the consuming fire from which precious few would be spared. Desperate refugees hover on a boat. (Could Chagall have anticipated his own good fortune in escaping across the Atlantic three years later?)

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.