US still fighting demons of racist heritage

THE murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager dragged from his bed by two white men, beaten, shot and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, has been an open sore in the impoverished community of Money for five decades. His only crime was to wolf-whistle at a white woman behind the counter of a grocery store.

The 14-year-old's death in 1955, on a holiday from Chicago, was one of several great injustices of a racially charged era that brought America's fledgling civil rights movement into violent conflict with the Ku Klux Klan.

Last week ageing Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen was convicted by a Mississippi court for the killing of three young civil rights activists 41 years ago. The 80-year-old preacher, received a 60-year jail term for his role in the murders, which were featured in the film Mississippi Burning.

Now, the Till murder is set to be the next case to throw the spotlight on the Deep South's continuing struggle to over come its violent, racist past.

Two men who were swiftly acquitted of Till's killing by an all-white jury in 1955, and who then confessed in a magazine article in exchange for money, are long dead, but FBI investigators believe others who are still alive may have been complicit.

Their determination to continue to root out all of those responsible was shown earlier this month when the boy's body was exhumed in a search for clues.

Earlier this month, the US Senate issued a formal apology for failing to outlaw lynching in the last century. It is estimated that between 1880 and 1960, illegal lynch mobs accounted for the deaths of up to 4,800 black people.

One of the nation's largest banks, Wachovia, apologised for the actions of its early managers in allowing customers to use slaves as collateral on loans.

The Till case is the only one still unresolved of the so-called 'blockbuster' atrocities, including Killen and the Alabama church bombing that killed four young black girls in 1963, which turned the tide of public opinion and helped bring about the end of racial segregation.

"Even if it's too late to bring anyone to justice for this, the real victory was when they decided to reopen the case," said Angeline Wilson, the wife of a black farmer who has lived in Money, about six miles north of the Leflore County town of Greenwood, for 18 years.

"A lot of the whites in town say that too much time has passed or that it won't achieve anything but I think it's important that we acknowledge what happened here and move on together."

Money is now a shadow of its former self. The cotton factory that once employed hundreds of workers closed years ago and lies abandoned with disused machinery rusting outside.

The population is down to less than a quarter of its 1955 figure of 400, housed in a dozen or so ramshackle houses along a three-quarter mile stretch of road sandwiched by a railroad track and the Tallahatchie River. The community is mixed, but only whites generally attend Sunday services and Wednesday prayer meetings at the Riverside Baptist church, a small example of how some degree of racial segregation still exists, if only by tradition.

Shifting demographics are part of the reason why relations between the black and white communities in Leflore County, whose 38,000 population is 63% African American, are now so good, according to Greenwood mayor Harry Smith.

"A lot of the families who felt the way they did have gone," he said. "Integration has played a part and we're much better at working together now than we used to be. We all swim together now, or we sink."

In his 12 years as mayor, Smith has overseen the appointment of the city's first black fire chief and city clerk. The acting police chief is also black, and in an election earlier this month, city councillor Sheriel Perkins came within six votes of defeating Smith and becoming Greenwood's first black mayor (a legal challenge to the result is possible).

"Nobody gets a job here because of their skin colour, it's how they do that job," Smith said.

Such appointments would have been unthinkable 40 years when Greenwood, a town of about 20,000 residents, found itself at the forefront of Mississippi's racial tensions. It was variously a rallying point for the Klan and the civil rights protestors, and was the home of fertiliser salesman Byron de la Beckwith, the defendant in another notorious race-hate murder trial. Beckwith shot Medgar Evers, an official of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, in 1963 but was convicted and sentenced to life in prison only at his third trial in 1994. He died in 2001.

Despite the best efforts of Smith and his council, and the fact that Mississippi has the largest number of elected black officials of any state, including Bennie Thompson, its first black Congressman, not everyone believes that things have changed for the better.

"There are still places in town where we don't go - certain restaurants and stores," said a 34-year-old black woman shop assistant. "You know you're not welcome, and you're made to feel uncomfortable. It's just a little comment or a look, but to me it's the same as segregation."

The Southern Poverty Law Centre, which monitors race-hate groups in the United States, says that while it is aware of at least six chapters of the Ku Klux Klan still active in Mississippi, and more in several other southern states, the group's popularity has waned and is considered largely a "white trash" organisation patronised by idealistic hotheads.

More of a threat is posed, it says, by the 15,000-member Council of Conservative Citizens, a "brazenly racist and white supremacist group" that has won the support of a number of high-level, mostly Republican politicians and senior members of the judiciary. The SPLC's Intelligence Report claims that Mississippi governor Haley Barbour and Congressman Roger Wicker have spoken at CCC fund-raising events.

"There is still systemic, deep-seated bias and prejudice in the South and across the nation," said Morris Dees, the SPLC's founder and director.

"Still, you have to see progress in that a majority-white jury convicted Killen, a crippled, white 80-year-old man. A conviction 41 years on speaks volumes for justice in Mississippi today and shows that jurors in the Deep South are willing to look at these cases with an unbiased eye. It makes each additional case easier to bring."

FBI Special Agent William Jenkins, who is leading the inquiry into Emmett Till's death said:

"We are dedicated to prosecuting any participant in this heinous crime."