Reopening the Emmett Till Case Is a Cynical Play

JACKSON, Miss.—If there is a fight to be had for the future of America, it will be waged in the Delta. The great alluvial plain to the west and north of here, stretching from Vicksburg on up to Memphis, and expanding out like a fan from the mighty Mississippi River, is a storied home to movement, and is the proving ground of the laws and legends that make the country what it is today. Past the soybean farms and pine stands, the cotton plantations and catfish ponds, there’s a political significance to this agricultural expanse. The Mississippi Delta is a reservoir of demographic strength—the blackest part of the blackest state in the country. But it is also one of the poorest places in America, and a region where the struggle for basic human rights is not yet settled.

At the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, it is made clear just how the Mississippi of before begat the Mississippi of today. The state was built on ethnic of the blackness of the region that the version of Jim Crow implemented there was the zenith—or the nadir—of the form, a roiling campaign of theft and intimidation that over the course of a century watered the fertile soil of the Delta with somewhere near 600 lynchings. There at the museum, the names of Mississippi martyrs like Medgar Evers and Reverend George Lee are raised in honor. Chief among them is Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy whose lynching proved a horror too far.