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Should the Emmett Till case be reopened?

(from the Associated Press) The Justice Department is reopening the murder investigation of Emmett Till, a black Chicago teenager killed during a 1955 visit to Mississippi apparently because he whistled at a white man's wife. R. Alexander Acosta, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, said recent documentary films about the case and other new information indicate the two had accomplices who may still be alive and could be prosecuted under Mississippi state law. 'We owe it to Emmett Till and we owe it to ourselves to see whether after all these years some additional measure of justice remains possible,' Acosta said at a news conference. The decision follows a lengthy campaign by the NAACP, members of Congress and Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, to get the Justice Department to reopen the case. Mobley, who died in Chicago last year at age 81, is widely credited with generating attention for her son's murder by showing his battered body in an open casket at his funeral. Airickca Gordon, a cousin of Till's who was close to his mother, said the family was elated at the news. 'Even though she's now deceased, I feel her spirit will be so much at peace,' Gordon said. The Till case gave many Americans a closer look at the segregated South, its Jim Crow laws and lynchings. The slaying occurred a little over a year after the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawed state-sponsored school segregation and about 100 days before seamstress Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the white section of a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala. Till was visiting relatives when he was abducted from his uncle's home in Money, Miss., on Aug. 28, 1955, a few days after allegedly whistling at Carolyn Bryant at her family's store. The 14-year-old's mutilated body was found by fishermen three days later in the Tallahatchie River. Carolyn Bryant's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. Milam, were a

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