Gary Younge

The ballot initiative sought to remove the most objectionable elements of the state’s Constitution that remain, even though they have been overridden by more recent civil rights legislation. They include passages such as: “Separate schools shall be provided for white and colored children, and no child of either race shall be permitted to attend a school of the other race.”

And: “To avoid confusion and disorder and to promote effective and economical planning for education, the legislature may authorize the parents or guardians of minors, who desire that such minors shall attend schools provided for their own race.”

Almost 50 years since Rosa Parks was ejected from a bus in the shadow of the governor’s mansion because she would not move to the back, most people thought the amendment to remove the segregation clause would pass fairly easily. “It was more ceremonial than legalistic,” said Bryan Fair, a law professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. “The language in the Constitution was already unconstitutional and this would have brought Alabama up to date. So it was surprising that something so clear and symbolic would be even close.”

Even the Montgomery Advertiser, not given to radical outbursts, backed it. “Amendment 2 is a valuable cleansing of a grievous stain on the state’s image,” it argued in an editorial shortly before the vote. “It should be ratified.” But powerful groups and personalities on the right campaigned heavily against it, claiming that the amendment opened the door to lawyers to sue the state and raise taxes.

They were most incensed by efforts to remove the section that denied that Alabamians had “any right to education or training at public expense.” Opponents claim education is a gift from the state of Alabama, not an entitlement. “You open up that door, that is a trial lawyer’s dream, to represent clients that have unbridled opportunity for mischief in raising taxes, tampering with private and parochial schools. It’s unlimited,” said John Giles, president of the Alabama Christian Coalition. “Activists on the bench know no bounds. It’s a trial lawyer’s dream.”

Giles’ campaign was assisted by former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who has become a local hero since he defied a federal court order to remove a two-ton slab of granite engraved with the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court.

Giles said he would have been happy to see the racist language go if the issue of education rights remained. But many in Alabama believe the taxation argument was simply a ruse for white Southerners to flex their muscles, even on a symbolic issue.

After the Supreme Court ordered the end of segregation 50 years ago, many white Southerners simply moved their children from state schools to private academies, often referred to as “seg academies” because they effectively kept segregation intact. Since then Alabama has provided the backdrop for some of the ugliest scenes during the civil rights era, from the bombing of a church in Birmingham that killed four little girls at Sunday school to the beating of marchers on St. Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

“There are people here who are still fighting the civil war,” Tommy Woods, 63, a deacon at Bethel Baptist Church and a retired school administrator, told the Washington Post. “They’re holding on to things that are long since past. It’s almost like a religion.”

A statute banning interracial marriage in the state was struck down only four years ago by 59 percent to 41 percent, with a majority of whites voting against the change.

This year Moore’s former aide, Tom Parker, was elected to the Alabama Supreme Court even after it became clear that he had been handing out Confederate flags while campaigning and had attended a function honoring the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

“It seems perfectly clear that a number of the people who voted against the amendment did so for purely racist reasons,” said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, an antiracist monitoring group based in Montgomery.

But in one of the most lightly taxed states in the nation the argument that the measure could raise the fiscal burden went a long way, some say. “In Alabama, if an opponent can label a policy as a tax, then 99 times out of 100 the policy fails,” said Prof Fair, who is an African-American. “Some folks in Alabama are assiduously holding on to what they call Southern traditions, which are traditions of white people being superior. But racism by itself is far too simple an explanation.”

“I’ve got enough supplies for another two days, but I don’t know what I’m going to do after that,” said Sarah Jackson as she entered her second hour in a queue outside Wal-Mart. “I keep telling myself I’m lucky because it could have been worse, but with each day I feel less and less lucky.”

Officials on the Gulf Coast say the emphasis has moved from search and rescue to bag and tag as emergency rescue workers cut their way through to Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss., to find the death toll rising steadily.

“This is far worse than any of the worst-case scenarios we thought we would ever have to deal with,” said one law enforcement official.

Ten people have so far been reported dead in Jackson County, home to Pascagoula.

“The magnitude of it is mind-boggling,” a Mississippi congressman, Gene Taylor, told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. “I’m guessing tens of thousands of homes are gone.”

While everyone here was hard hit by Katrina, not everyone was affected in the same way. The wealthy lost property on the seafront. But the lives and the livelihoods of the poor without cars with which to escape, sturdy homes to protect them and insurance to fall back on, were the most vulnerable.

In one of the poorest states in the country, where black people earn half as much as white people, this has taken on a racial dimension. “People who live in poverty and don’t have the means to evacuate were definitely more likely to perish,” said Michael Matthews, an African-American who was nudging his car slowly along the four-hour queue for gas in Lucedale.

“The president is flying down here tomorrow in a plane, to tell us we can only use 20 gallons of gas. I think they are taking advantage.”

In Yvonne trailer park in Lucedale, residents hold out little hope of speedy government help. “I don’t think we’ll see any of that here,” said Raybelle Perrymon, sitting in the shade on her wheelchair, stricken by polio. She is an elderly black woman cared for by a younger white man, Charles Childens, who shares her trailer and her Kools.

She cannot get her disability benefit because the banks are closed. That means she cannot pay her rent or buy food. “We need help, but I don’t think we’re going to get any, until everybody else has gotten theirs,” she said. Childens nodded. “We need something to eat,” he said. “We need it pretty soon.”

Lives, like the trees, have been uprooted, and some have returned home to find almost nothing as it was.

“Look down,” Maureen Burnett told a New York Times reporter as she searched for her mother in Pass Christian. “See that kitchen table? That’s her table … the house ain’t there.”

Pascagoula residents expressed frustration with the relief effort, complaining it was too slow in doling out provisions and information. “We can’t wait for the kind of help they are giving,” said Sharon Jones, sitting on her porch.

“The lines [for handouts] are ridiculous. You need to wait five or six hours for water and ice, and that’s all the authorities are giving. I’ve got food for one more day; after that I’ll have to pray.”

Jones said her mother had lost everything. “They keep telling us to call FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency]. When we try to call we can’t get through; she’s just lucky I’m here.”

Gas curbs are getting tighter, and Thursday night people could only buy $30 worth of fuel. Many gas stations are closed, forcing people like Rover Furnas to make a 40-mile round trip to fill up his car. “This situation has had a severe mental effect on everybody, but as for a physical effect, well, that has hurt some a lot more than others,” he said.

When it comes to a duel between DePaul University political science professor Norman Finkelstein and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz over Finkelstein’s upcoming book, “Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History,” gigantic bombast feels like an understatement. It is a row that has spilled onto the pages of most of the nation’s prominent newspapers and gone all the way to the desk of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Like the two professors in Irvine Welsh’s “The Acid House” who abandon their high-minded theoretical clashes for a drunken brawl in a car park, Finkelstein and Dershowitz hover between principle and raw verbal pugilism in which the personal and the political are almost indistinguishable.

Finkelstein says Dershowitz is a “total liar,” adding that “if a true word were to leap out of his mouth he would explode.” Dershowitz eschews direct personal attacks only to ascribe his jibes to others. “Many people have thought [Finkelstein] was unstable … he is like a child … he makes up facts.”

But beneath the vitriol lie many vital issues: namely Israel, Palestine, human rights in the Middle East, anti-Semitism, academic freedom and intellectual honesty. Not to mention the scope for discussing these subjects in the United States, Israel’s greatest ally, where the parameters for debate are relatively narrow compared with the rest of the Western world. “The atmosphere for publishing critical stuff on Israel here is very intimidating,” says Colin Robinson, who as publisher of the New Press initially intended to publish Finkelstein’s book.

Finkelstein billed his book as “an exposé of the corruption of scholarship on the Israel-Palestine conflict,” but essentially it is an attack on Dershowitz in general and his bestselling book, “The Case for Israel,” in particular, which Finkelstein describes as “among the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine conflict.”

This is fighting talk. But then both of these writers come to this subject and each other with some form.

Finkelstein is best known for his book “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.” The book, serialized in the Guardian, argued that the Holocaust should not be treated as a sacred event to be exploited by a huge “memory industry” but understood as one of many genocides. Translated into 17 languages, it drew widespread criticism from many Jews for playing to an anti-Semitic gallery in both its tone and its tenor. It is “filled with precisely the kind of shrill hyperbole that Finkelstein rightly deplores in much of the current media hype over the Holocaust,” wrote historian Omer Bartov, who holds a chair at Brown University. “It is brimming with the same indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics and dubious contextualizations.” Other experts believe he has a point.

Dershowitz is not just a prominent figure in American academe but in the nation’s cultural life. He was part of both O.J. Simpson’s and Mike Tyson’s defense teams. In 1991, he wrote “Chutzpah,” in which he argued that American Jews should shed their self-image as second-class citizens and engage more bravely with gentile America. In 2003 he wrote “The Case for Israel.”

A passionate advocate of Zionism and Israel, who after Sept. 11, 2001, made the case for torture of suspects whom authorities believed to be hiding information about “an imminent large-scale threat,” Dershowitz is also loathed by the left. Noam Chomsky has described him as a “Stalinist-style thug.”

Both Finkelstein and Dershowitz insist they would rather not stoop to the other’s level but have been provoked. “I feel that I have an obligation to defend the ideas,” says Dershowitz. “He is not going to destroy my career. But if they can attack me in this way, then it can have a powerful message for others who share my ideas that their careers can be destroyed.”

Finkelstein insists that Dershowitz either is baiting him or is insane. “On a public relations front his attacks have become so hysterical that [Dershowitz] is either trying to provoke me or he’s imploding. My friends keep telling me, ‘Norman, don’t respond.’”

Finkelstein’s criticisms of Dershowitz’s book can be reduced to two central themes. The first amounts to an accusation of academic fraud. He originally asserted that Dershowitz “almost certainly didn’t write [it] and perhaps didn’t even read it prior to publication.” He also charged that Dershowitz “plagiarizes large swaths” of “From Time Immemorial” by Joan Peters, a now-discredited — by Finkelstein — 1984 book, which attempted to buttress the Zionist argument that the land that is now Israel was underpopulated, and its few inhabitants a collection of different peoples, not Palestinians with a strong claim. (In the version that has just gone to press, the word “plagiarize” has been softened to “lifts from” or “appropriates without attribution.”) Finkelstein alleges that of the 52 quotations and endnotes in the first two chapters of Dershowitz’s book, 22 are almost exact replicas of Peters’ book. However, instead of quoting Peters as the source, Dershowitz cites the original sources from Peters’ footnotes.

The second accusation is that Dershowitz’s defense of Israel’s human rights record during the second intifada is based on flawed or fraudulent data, which Finkelstein challenges with reports from organizations such as Amnesty International, the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. “I juxtapose what he says is going on there and what is actually going on there,” says Finkelstein.

A recent piece in the left-wing magazine the Nation details some of the points of contention. Finkelstein takes issue, for example, with Dershowitz’s assertion that “when only innocent civilians are counted, significantly more Israelis than Palestinians have been killed.” Yet, he says that, according to Amnesty International, even when only unarmed civilians are counted, the ratio is still 3-to-1, Palestinian to Israeli. Dershowitz argues that the Israel Defense Force tries to use rubber bullets “and aims at the legs whenever possible”; he points to a 2002 Amnesty report that rubber bullets are regularly used against children, at close range, often injuring their heads or upper bodies.

Dershowitz says his principal grievance is with the accusation that he hadn’t written the book: “It’s like disputing the paternity of my children,” he says. “I know I wrote the book. I wrote every single word of it” — and he dismisses the plagiarism allegations as malevolent pedantry. He says they were investigated by the Harvard library and dismissed as a “frivolous charge.” And he says he can prove he used some of the citations in public debates as far back as the ’70s and that he first saw the other quotes in Peters’ book, then went and checked the originals in the Harvard library.

On the issue of what is going on in Israel, Dershowitz claims that Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch did not get all of their facts right and that Finkelstein is a “transient academic” with little practical knowledge of the Middle East. “This is a man who until recently had never been to Israel.”

When Dershowitz found out that Finkelstein’s book was going to be published by the New Press, says Robinson, who published “The Holocaust Industry” when he was an editor at Verso, he got the home addresses of the New Press board and urged them not to publish it. “I got four letters from Dershowitz in three months.”

Realizing that the book was bound to provoke great controversy, Robinson says he sought to postpone publication from early spring to early autumn so that he could be sure they got it right. “We wanted our ducks in a row. We wanted to read the manuscript to know what we would be defending before we put it in the catalog.”

Piqued, Finkelstein took the book to the University of California Press, saying that he wanted to get it out as early as possible. “The book was very timely and I thought a delay would be damaging,” he says.

After the U.C. Press decided to take it on, Dershowitz wrote to Schwarzenegger, but even he would not get involved. “You have asked for the Governor’s assistance in preventing the publication of this book,” wrote his legal affairs secretary. “He is not inclined to otherwise exert influence in this case because of the clear academic freedom issue it presents.” According to the Nation’s reporter Jon Wiener, who is also a professor of history at the University of California, Dershowitz got a prominent law firm to write stern letters to the university regents, to the university provost, to 17 directors of the press and to 19 members of the press’s faculty editorial committee.

U.C. Press defends Finkelstein. “His books are very, very thoroughly researched,” Lynne Withey, the publishing house’s director, told the Associated Press. “He clearly has a point of view that is antithetical to Dershowitz’s, but scholars line up on both sides of the issue.” Dershowitz denounces the U.C. Press as “very hard-left” and “very anti-Zionist”: “No other university press would publish garbage like this.”

Dershowitz, who received the William O. Douglas First Amendment Award from the Jewish advocacy group the Anti-Defamation League, says he never wanted to curb Finkelstein’s freedom of speech. “I want to see his book published,” he says. “I want to see it demolished in the marketplace of ideas. I just want the false personal charges taken out.”

U.C. Press persuaded Finkelstein to withdraw the claim that Dershowitz had not written his book, thereby relegating this rather serious charge to the status of an overexuberant rhetorical flourish. In a statement accompanying review copies, the press explained that “Professor Finkelstein’s only claim on the issue was speculative … We felt this weakened the argument and distracted from the central issues of the book. Finkelstein agreed.”

For a while last month, it seemed as though Finkelstein’s book might never come out. Involved in delicate negotiations with U.C. Press, at one point he posted a message on his Web site saying that it had been dropped. But with the book coming out later this month he is bullish once again. “I have not retracted one jot of one word of what I’ve said the past year.”

Dershowitz, meanwhile, says he has no plans to sue “that nut job” despite the disputed allegations that remain. He too has a book coming out this month. Its title: “The Case for Peace.”

This was apparent in the closing arguments of the trial, when both the prosecution and the defense let slip how far the verdict went beyond the guilt or innocence of one man. “When justice is done here, [the victims' families] will go back to New York or Oregon, or wherever they came from, give them the bad news, and we’ll have to live with this trial,” said the defense lawyer, James McIntyre.

Mark Duncan, the prosecuting district attorney countered: “There is only one question. Is a Neshoba County jury going to tell the rest of the world that we are not going to let Edgar Ray Killen get away with murder anymore? Not one day more.”

Most of the evidence presented at the trial has been known for 40 years. “It wasn’t like there was any one thing that happened that said, ‘Here’s the magic bullet,’” Duncan told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “It really was that we had gotten to the end. There was nothing to do.”

But as the defendants and the witnesses got older, there was a fear that Killen might die and take Mississippi’s reputation down with him. For some this was a race against time to show that the potency of race in the former Confederacy had been extinguished. Killen’s manslaughter conviction, like the conviction of 22 others for civil-rights-era killings in the past 16 years, was part of a push to show that the goods, as well as the packaging, had changed.

At the Chamber of Commerce in the Mississippi town of Philadelphia you can find a glossy pamphlet titled “Neshoba County, African-American Heritage Driving Tour: Roots of Struggle, Rewards of Sacrifice.” Inside you are invited to join “a journey toward freedom,” complete with a map detailing where the three young men were murdered and buried.

“It’s a captivating story,” said Jim Prince, editor of the Neshoba Democrat, the local paper. “The dark of night, the Ku Klux Klan — it’s got all the elements for great drama, but it’s a true story and it’s a sad story. I tell people if they can’t be behind the call for justice because it’s the right thing to do, and that’s first and foremost, then they need to do it because it’s good for business.”

The desire of many Southerners for a makeover is understandable, as is their irritation at the North’s continued attempts to caricature them.

According to a census report from 2002, the top five residentially segregated metropolitan areas in the United States are Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis and Newark, N.J. — none of which is in the South. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, there are higher rates of black poverty in the Northern states of Wisconsin, Illinois and West Virginia than in Mississippi.

The only difference between the North and the South, wrote the late James Baldwin, was that “the north promised more. And [there was only] this similarity: what it promised it did not give and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other.”

Nonetheless, if much has changed, much has remained the same. Indeed the Ku Klux Klan still marches in town every year, and during the Killen trial Harlan Majure, the mayor of Philadelphia during the 1990s, said he had no problem with the Klan. Majure told the jury the Klan “did a lot of good up here,” and claimed that he was not personally aware of the organization’s bloody past.

African-Americans in the state remain at a huge disadvantage. Infant mortality rates among blacks are twice as high, blacks’ earnings are half as much as whites’, and black people are three times as likely to live in poverty. The state has the lowest wages and highest infant mortality rates and poverty in the country.

Before the trial Leroy Clemons, head of the local chapter the NAACP, said it was time for the town of Philadelphia to move on and tackle the problems blighting the area today. “It doesn’t matter where you go in the world: People talk about Mississippi; they think racists, backwards people. We want to show them the state has changed. I don’t want to paint a picture free of racism; we still have issues. One thing about [the trial], it’s forced us to deal with our past.”

And Tuesday night Ben Chaney, the brother of one of the victims, James Chaney, a black Mississippian, thanked “the white people who walked up to me and said things are changing. I think there’s hope.”

“We fact-checked this thing through alternate and overlapping sources. The chief fact checker had been through it dozens and dozens of times to fill in the gaps. But the ultimate confirmation could come from only two sources.” But calling Woodward, or Bernstein, who is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, was out of the question.

“We skipped the last two phone calls,” explains Carter. “If Bob knew what we were going to do he could have got it up on the Web within two hours, but we wouldn’t be able to get it on the newsstands for at least two weeks.” One of his colleagues warned him he would need “brass balls” to see it through.

Brass-balled is not the obvious description for Carter, who has just married Anna Scott, a Brit 18 years his junior, whose father is an equerry to the queen. He is a dandy of the old school. When he comes to London he stays at the Dorchester; he gets his stationery made in Paris at Benetton; he is out of the office every day by 5:30 p.m. and out of most cocktail parties within five minutes. “You go in, you go right to the guest of honor, and you go right to the host,” he once explained. “You never take off your coat, you never pick up a glass, and you never say goodbye. Sometimes I do four or five of those in one night.” But when it came to this story, the brass balls were firmly in place.

Staff in Vanity Fair’s Times Square office told him the Washington Post planned to make a statement in the next seven minutes. “I was terrified they were going to say it was someone else,” he says. “I thought if they say it’s some other guy this is going to be a long trip back to the United States. I was 95 percent sure and I thought that was about as sure as I’m going to be. Sometimes you’ve got to close your eyes, pull the trigger and hope for the best.”

Only when Woodward finally released himself from his pledge never to reveal Deep Throat’s identity while he was still alive did Carter know that he had hit the bull’s-eye. He arrived back in New York from his honeymoon to a hero’s welcome. “The identity of Deep Throat isn’t the most earth-shattering story in the world,” he says. “But among journalistic secrets this is the Holy Grail.”

It was the culmination of two years of intermittent discussions with Felt’s representatives that started with a phone call out of the blue in March 2003. “Graydon, you’ve got someone on the phone who wants to talk to you about Deep Throat,” his assistant said. “It was funny because my assistant had no idea who Deep Throat was,” says Carter. “I think people under 30 still think you’re talking about the porn film.”

Carter took the call himself. On the other end of the phone was John O’Connor, the lawyer friend of the Felt family who was representing them and who finally wrote the piece for Vanity Fair. “He sounded reasonably credible,” says Carter. “But you get a lot of calls like this. I told him I’d get someone to get back to him right away.”

He asked David Friend, a senior editor on the magazine, to “see how serious this is.” Not long afterward O’Connor flew out to New York. Carter paints a picture of naifs on a mission to make money. The Felt family had a secret that they knew was valuable. But they knew neither how valuable it was nor how to realize that value.

“The family were all new to this part of the American circus,” says Carter. “They were talking about book deals and film rights. I told them that we wouldn’t be able to pay them anything apart from the writer. But I also told them that if you do it in Vanity Fair you will have a great launching pad to explore the next level. This will bring it worldwide attention.”

Vanity Fair, a glossy general-interest monthly, certainly has an international reach. Its combination of soft-pat celebrity interviews, stunning photographs, an eclectic stable of accomplished writers and the occasional political feature has a British readership that stretches from Guardian regulars to Daily Mail buyers.

The family considered their options. “It went cold for six months,” says Carter. “Then it would come up every two months and then go on the back burner. They were making up their mind.”

They took it to HarperCollins, where Judith Regan, publisher of the Regan Books imprint, said the possibility of a deal collapsed because of serious concerns about 91-year-old Felt’s state of mind. Carter did not regard this as a serious concern. The Time stable also passed on the story. For a while it seemed as though the Holy Grail was up for the highest bidder and everyone was passing on it.

O’Connor came back to Vanity Fair, where he was finally paid $10,000. “The money is not that much,” says Carter. But if getting the story was tricky, keeping it would be even more so. “We just thought, how the hell do we keep this a secret for two years?” he says. “It is a very transparent organization. There are no closed doors here. But there was about this. I was worried that people would feel they’d been kept in the dark, but when they did find out they understood absolutely.”

Carter started with an inner circle of two — him and Friend — and then expanded the circle on a need-to-know basis from the art director and fact checker to an eventual group of just 15. The story had a code name — WIG — and on the dummy copies as it moved toward publication it also had a dummy cover line — “The Car Door Slams.” The photographer was not even allowed to tell his wife where he was going — a particularly odd state of affairs because his wife is the photo director of Vanity Fair.

Given the current journalistic climate in the United States — two reporters face prison time for refusing to reveal an anonymous source and the relationship between the press and the Bush administration remains at best tense — Carter believes the timing of the story couldn’t have been better. “All administrations are out to intimidate journalists,” he says. “But none has had such a particularly antagonistic view of the press since Nixon.”

His magazine has done its part, but Carter thinks Deep Throat will continue to be a story. “It will go on for a little while,” he says. “Particularly if Woodward gets together with Carl. That would be great marketing,” says the editor, with one eye on celebrity and the other on politics. “That would be like the Beatles.”

“Someone asked me if I was sad today,” said Simeon Wright, a cousin of Emmett’s late mother as he waited at the grave site on June 1. “I was sad in 1955. My heart was broken then. But now I’m not sad. We are almost at the end of it.”

The murder of Emmett Till has been seared into the collective memory of most African-Americans. It was the subject of the first play by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, of a poem by Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes and of a song by Bob Dylan. It was also a huge galvanizing event for the civil rights movement. Just three months after the murder, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in Montgomery, Ala., sparking the bus boycott that would kick-start the civil rights era, she said Till was on her mind.

Emmett left his home in Chicago to stay with relatives in Mississippi for his summer holidays. It was 1955 — the year in which the first McDonald’s opened, William Faulkner won a Pulitzer Prize and Bill Haley rocked around the clock. The Supreme Court had only recently outlawed segregation, and the world had yet to hear of a young preacher named Martin Luther King. The South was in an ugly mood.

Before Emmett left, his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, warned him that things were different in the South. “If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly,” she said. But Emmett couldn’t resist a dare and a joke. “He was known as a prankster, a risk-taker and a smart dresser who nevertheless did well in school,” wrote Stephen Whitfield in “A Death in the Delta,” his 1988 book about the murder.

So while he was down in the small town of Money, in the Delta region, he either said, “Bye, baby” or wolf-whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, in a grocery store. Three days later his body was fished out of the Tallahatchie River with a bullet in his skull, an eye gouged out and his forehead crushed on one side. A fisherman found his body with a 75-pound fan from a cotton gin tied to his neck with barbed wire. His corpse was so mangled that his uncle could identify it only by his initialed ring.

The local sheriff wanted to bury the body as soon as possible in Mississippi. But once Mobley heard what had happened, she insisted that it be returned for burial in Chicago. When she arrived to pick up her son at the train station, she ordered the casket open. In one of the most powerful scenes of the civil rights movement, Mobley ran her hands across his body, studying his hairline, teeth and ring, and then collapsed on the platform floor shouting, “Lord, take my soul,” before being taken out in a wheelchair.

“Have you ever sent a loved one on a vacation and had him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered and waterlogged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son — lynched?” she asked. The undertaker asked her if she wanted her son “fixed up.” No, she replied, “you can’t fix that. Let the world see what I saw.”

Mobley’s decision to leave the coffin open and delay the funeral by three days exposed to the rest of America and the world what was happening in Mississippi. Jet, a popular black magazine, published a picture of the body. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets of Chicago’s South Side to see it, and more than 2,000 attended the funeral. “If you were indifferent, the Till murder at 14 made you interested,” the black paper the Chicago Defender wrote shortly before Mobley’s own funeral in January 2003. “If you were a routine onlooker, the murder turned you into a revolutionary; if you were moderate, the murder turned you militant.”

It has long been clear who murdered Till. In 1955, Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother J.W. Milam were paid $4,000 for an interview with Look magazine in which they effectively admitted it. “I’m no bully,” he told the magazine. “I never hurt a nigger in my life. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice … ‘Chicago boy,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of them sending your kind down here to stir up trouble; I’m going to make an example of you, just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.’”

But that was two months after both men had been acquitted by a jury of their peers — all white, Southern men. At the end of the five-day trial, their defense lawyer had made a simple pitch to the bigotry of the jurors. “Your fathers will turn over in their graves [if Milam and Bryant are found guilty] and I’m sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men in the face of that [outside] pressure.” It took the jury just 67 minutes to return a not-guilty verdict. One of the jurors said they would have returned earlier if they had not stopped for a soda.

But last year the Justice Department reopened the case, after filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, who was making a documentary, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” found witnesses who did not testify at the trial and had not previously spoken in public. Among them was Wright, who shared a bed with Emmett the night before he was abducted. “The last time I saw him, some men were forcing him to get out of bed and get his clothes on, and that was it,” said Wright, now 62. “I never dreamed we would finally get to this day.” The new witnesses all say there were around 10 more people involved in the murder than was previously thought, five of whom are still alive today. At least one them is believed to be black.

The decision to reopen the case last year was greeted enthusiastically by civil rights campaigners and some politicians. “As a nation, we should never be afraid to acknowledge our mistakes — however difficult — so that we can learn from them,” said New York Sen. Charles Schumer on the day of the announcement. “The truth, as they say, will set you free. It’s no less true in the case of Emmett Till from 50 years ago than it is today.”

But the decision to exhume the body initially divided Emmett’s remaining family. “I personally don’t see the point at this time of digging his body up,” Bertha Thomas, a distant cousin and president of the Emmett Till Foundation, told the New York Times. “They don’t need his body or remains in order to pursue [the perpetrators] if they have solid proof that other people were involved.” Before she died, Mobley had told loved ones that she did not want her son to be exhumed; she simply wanted the state of Mississippi to apologize.

But other family members said that without the exhumation it would not be possible to secure a prosecution. With no autopsy performed when he died, the original jury could not even be sure that the body in question was Emmett’s, despite Mobley’s positive identification during the trial. “Most reasonable people fully believe that it is Emmett Till in the grave,” Robert Garrity, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau’s office in Jackson, Miss., told USA Today. “I believe it is Emmett Till. But we know from the ’55 trial that the defense raised the specter that the state had not ever proved that Emmett Till was dead, much less that the body was indeed Till.”

The autopsy, says Alvin Sykes, president of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign, will be “Emmett’s first and last chance to speak for himself … He’ll be able to tell us that it is him, and as much as possible, whether there is any evidence or support for others being involved.”

This is only one of a rash of civil-rights-era cases that have recently been reopened decades after the crimes were committed. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., 25 cases have been reexamined or are under reexamination, which have led to 26 arrests, 21 convictions, two acquittals and a mistrial. On June 13, Edgar Ray Killen will go on trial for the murder of three young civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss. — the case that formed the basis for the movie “Mississippi Burning.”

The FBI also recently found what is believed to be the only existing transcript of the 1955 Till trial. “It was in pretty poor shape,” said Garrity, “so we had to go through it line by line, word by word, and retype it.” Leesha Faulkner, a reporter who covers courts for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, says it is common for such records to have gone missing in Mississippi. “If something didn’t suit somebody, they took it home and put it in their attic and never said anything about it.”

The FBI plans to use the transcript to seek out discrepancies between witness statements then and now. But just as new evidence trickles in, so older evidence continues to fade, bringing a sense of urgency to a case that until recently was relegated to the past. “The witnesses and potential defendants are getting much older,” says Sen. Schumer. “We cannot afford to wait.”