Confronting the past: as prosecutors take fresh looks at decades-old cases, Southern communities are being forced to revisit some of the most painful episodes of the civil rights era.

On Aug. 28, 1955, in Money, Miss., a black teenager named Emmett Till was dragged from his bed in the middle of the night, beaten, shot in the head, and dropped in the Tallahatchie River. Till, a 14-year-old Chicagoan who was visiting relatives, may have made the fatal mistake of whistling at a white woman at a store a few days earlier.

Till's mother held a public funeral, and the acquittal of two white men in the crime by an all-white jury became a galvanizing moment of the civil rights movement. Now, 50 years later, prosecutors have decided to reopen the case, prompted by information uncovered by two filmmakers suggesting that people besides the two original suspects may have been involved in Till's death.

Some 120 miles away from Money, in the small city of Philadelphia, Miss., a new generation is asking for justice in another notorious civil rights era crime: the 1964 murders of three voting-rights activists by the Ku Klux Klan, an event chronicled in the film Mississippi Burning.

Decades after the era of sit-ins, segregation, and brutal lynchings, Money, Philadelphia, and other communities in the South are confronting the uncomfortable legacy of racial violence and intolerance that, until fairly recently, many thought had been relegated to the pages of history books, along with terms like Jim Crow and "whites only."

CIVIL RIGHTS MILESTONES

Places like Montgomery, Ala., the site of Rosa Parks's famous refusal to sit in the back of the bus in 1955, and institutions like the University of Mississippi, where a fierce integration battle took place in 1962, have in recent years examined and even embraced their roles in the battle for racial equality, building memorials and promoting sites associated with that era. Law-enforcement officials have also reopened the cases of the Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that killed tour black girls in 1963 and the murder that year of Mississippi civil rights advocate Medgar Evers, resulting in convictions in both cases.

"There's always been a sense of these things not having been put right, and I think a lot of people would like to see that happen," says Jimmy Thomas, managing editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, based at the University of Mississippi. "If we don't do it now, it may be too late."

Till's case, heavily covered by the media at the time, made a big impression on the nation, just as the modern civil rights movement was gathering steam. The image of his battered body in an open coffin at his funeral in Chicago was cited by civil rights advocates as an example of the brutality against blacks in the Deep South.

Testimony from witnesses at the time of Till's death linked two white men to the crime. But an all-white jury acquitted them in September 1955, after the defense made arguments that appealed to the jurors' white heritage. The men later gloated about the killing and provided gruesome details about the torture and murder to a magazine reporter. Both are now dead.

NEW EVIDENCE

But the stark images of Till continue to inspire strong feelings. Keith Beauchamp first saw the Till images when he was growing up in Baton Rouge, La. Now 32 and a filmmaker living in Brooklyn, N.Y., Beauchamp spent the last nine years making a documentary about the Till murder, which helped prompt the reopening of the case by the Justice Department. Beauchamp says that, based on his research, he believes five people are still alive who were involved in or had knowledge of the killing. In recent years, he has toured the country showing a partly completed version of his film, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, to drum up public support for a revisiting of the case.

LONGING FOR JUSTICE

A second New York filmmaker, Stanley Nelson, produced and directed a 2003 documentary titled The Murder of Emmett Till, which has also been reviewed by the Justice Department. Nelson too says he's hopeful the investigation will lead to charges against others who were involved, and federal authorities vow to pursue the new leads. "We owe it to Emmett Till, we owe it to his mother, we owe it to his family, and we owe it to ourselves to see if, after all these years, any additional measure of justice is still possible," says R. Alexander Acosta, an Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department.

That's what Till's family still hopes for. Simeon Wright, a cousin of Till's who shared a bed with him the night he was abducted, says the killing fractured what had once been a close-knit family, and relatives fled Mississippi for Chicago soon after the defendants were acquitted. Wright's father, a cotton farmer who stood up in court to point out the accused men, had to leave most of the family's possessions behind. "Our world was never the same after that," says Wright, a retired pipefitter in Chicago.

Families are also seeking justice in the murders of Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman of New York, and James Chaney of Mississippi. In June i964, the three activists were ambushed and killed on a country road in Philadelphia, Miss., while on a mission to register blacks to vote as part of a campaign called Freedom Summer. The men were killed shortly after going to examine the fire bombed remains of a black church in nearby Meridian.

The state of Mississippi has never prosecuted anyone for the killings (several men were convicted on federal conspiracy charges and served sentences of up to six years), and there has never been a full accounting of who took part in the ambush that involved as many as 21 people from a posse organized by the Ku Klux Klan. "All these years, I've been hoping there would be justice for those boys," says Carolyn Goodman, 88, whose son was 20 at the time of his death. "I'm still wailing."

LIVING UNDER A CLOUD

Forty years after the killings, some Philadelphia residents say the only way to move past the ugliness of the era is to confront it.

"We're tired of living under this cloud, these stereotypes and misconceptions about Philadelphia," says Leroy Clemons, 42, an NAACP leader in Philadelphia who is working with a white newspaper editor to establish a memorial to the murdered men. They also want the state to more vigorously examine the case, which was reopened in 1999.

Don Kilgore, 55, a lawyer who is white, says he sometimes dreads telling people where he is from. He finds the notoriety especially troubling because Philadelphia has come so far since the summer of 1964 and is now one of the more integrated places in Mississippi. "People have this idea that we're backwards and racist, and the lack of any conclusion to the case lends credence to those feelings," he says.

'SOMETHING YOU CAN'T WASH OFF'

Healing the wounds of the Jim Crow era is not easy and some people in places with a notorious past would rather not revisit it. More than a few scoff at the prospect of Philadelphia becoming a stop on the growing civil rights tourism circuit. Linda Jenkins, the owner of Carousel Gifts, Pools and Spa, across from the local courthouse, thinks that events of the summer of 1964 should be left alone. "It's part of history and we can't sweep it under the rug, but we have to move on," says Jenkins, 50, who is white.

Some black Southerners also don't want to think about an era that is thankfully behind them. Mary Jackson, 74, whose husband helped pull Emmett Till's body from the Tallahatchie, isn't sure reopening that case is a good idea. "I've been thinking about this long and hard, and I wonder what would be accomplished," she says. "We just want the story to die so people don't keep talking about this."

But Stanley Dearman, a white former newspaper reporter who covered the slayings of the civil rights workers in Philadelphia, says not seeking justice is not an option. "In 40 years, not a single day has gone by that I don't think about those boys," says Dearman, 72. "It's just something you can't wash off. People may not want to talk about it, but it will never go away. The thing won't let us forget."

RELATED ARTICLE: Rewriting history.

By James Dao in Lexington, Ky.

A Kentucky newspaper recently admitted that it purposely ignored or minimized the civil rights movement in its pages. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, protesters in Lexington, Ky., conducted peaceful weekly sit-ins at the city's racially segregated Lunch counters, hotels, and theaters. Both The Herald and The Leader, the main papers in the city, buried coverage of the protests, when they covered them at all. [The two papers merged in the 1980s to form the Herald-Leader.)

But in July, the Herald-Leader ran a front-page expose on its civil, rights coverage, which it said was not a result of mistakes or oversights, but a conscious strategy by the papers' former managers "to play down the movement" in hopes that it would wither away.

"That stance was not unusual, among newspapers across the South," the paper reported. "But from today's perspective, many experts agree that the decisions made at The Herald and The Leader hurt the civil rights movement at the time, irreparably damaged the historical, record, and caused the newspapers' readers to miss out on one of the most important stories of the 20th century."

In reaching back tour decades, The Herald-Leader went a step further than just about any other Southern paper in trying to set the record straight on its civil rights coverage, journalism experts say. In the 1990s, The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., published articles saying it had slanted coverage and published propaganda at the behest of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which had been created to infiltrate and discredit civil rights groups.

James Dao is a correspondent in the Washington bureau of The Times.

CONFRONTING THE PAST

As prosecutors begin to reopen decades-old civil rights cases, some communities in the South are facing painful moments in their history.

TEACHING OBJECTIVES

To help students understand a time when race-motivated murder and segregation were commonplace in parts of the United States--and why law-enforcement officials are digging into some of these cases 40 or 50 years later.

BEFORE READING: Write the numbers "4,743," "3,446," and "1,297" on the chalk board.

Tell students that data collected by Tuskegee University reveals that between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 4,743 people were lynched in the United States. Of these, 3,446 were black and 1,297 were white.

ANALYSIS/DISCUSSION: Direct students' attention to the comments of Jimmy Thomas (p. 13), who says "there's always been a sense of these things not having been put right."

Next, have students turn to page 15 and reread the comment of Linda Jenkins, who believes the events surrounding the murders of voting-rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney should be left alone.

Have students examine these contrasting views. Then, either verbally or in writing, have them explain what they think Thomas means when he says these events should be "put right." Students should identify the benefits to the community of recognizing past wrongs.

What benefit do students think Jenkins sees in leaving the events of 1964 alone? Does Jenkins contradict herself when she says those events can't be swept under the rug?

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

* Suppose additional killers in the Till case are found guilty. Should their current ages be taken into consideration when punishment is decided?

* What evidence does the article provide that there should have been a federal anti-lynching law in the 1950s and 1960s?

FAST FACT: The first federal anti-lynching law was passed in 1968.

WEB WATCH: www.spartacus.schoolnet .co.uk/USAlynching.htm provides a comprehensive history of lynching in the U.S.

www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects /ftrials/shipp/lynchingsstate.html shows lynchings by state and race between 1882 and 1968.

QUIZ 1

Confronting the Past

1. The Emmett Till case has been reopened because

a filmmakers have uncovered evidence that the wrong people were convicted of Till's murder.

b Mississippi law requires a periodic investigation of past murder cases.

c his family requested it.

d new evidence suggests that people in addition to those convicted were involved in the murder.

2. Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney were in Mississippi to work for

a voting rights.

b school desegregation.

c affordable housing for African-Americans.

d federal aid for African-Americans.

3. What was the outcome of the Schwerner/Goodman/Chaney case?

a The guilty parties were convicted of murder.

b No one was convicted in the case.

c Five men served 10 years for murder.

d Several men were convicted on federal conspiracy charges.

4. Rosa Parks is famous in civil rights history for her

a association with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

b refusal to give up her seat on a public bus.

c speech before Congress about human rights.

d pioneering work in writing civil rights legislation.

5. The reopening of the Till case was initiated by

a the U.S. Justice Department.

b Mississippi's Attorney General.

c police in the city of Money, Miss.

d the Mississippi Highway Patrol.

6. The term "Jim Crow" refers to

a a famous civil rights worker.

b the movement to promote racial integration.

c racial segregation and discrimination.

d Northern civil rights workers in the South.

Answer Key

1. (d) 2. (a) 3. (d) 4. (b) 5. (a) 6. (c)

Eric Lichtblau and Andrew Jacobs are reporters for The New York Times; additional reporting by Ian Zack.