PROVO — Every American teenager should know the story of Emmett Till — and never forget the racially charged 1955 murder of the 14-year-old black boy, says a Brigham Young University professor thrilled with the U.S. Justice Department decision to reopen the 50-year-old case.
Chris Crowe didn't learn about Till until after he completed his education, but he was so moved by the story that he wrote two books, including an award-winning historical fiction for teenagers.
Crowe channels his astonishment over his own ignorance into the narrator of "Mississippi Trial, 1995," as a white 16-year-old who witnesses the trial of the two men charged with Till's murder. The boy, who is visiting from the north — as was Till, who was from Chicago — discovers Mississippi and his grandfather aren't what they seemed when he was little and is shocked by the revelation.
The fictional boy confronts real events. When Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam are acquitted by an all-white jury after defense attorneys maintain Till's tortured and bloated body is unidentifiable, the boy is shocked as he leaves the courtroom by what he hears Sheriff Clarence Strider say to the media.
"I just want to tell all those people who've been sending me threatening letters that if they ever come down here, the same thing's gonna happen to them that happened to Emmett Till."
Crowe sides with those who say Till's murder and trial were the biggest story in America in 1955 and helped launch the civil rights movement.
"How could I not know this (the Till) story?" Crowe asked himself when he stumbled upon it while researching a book on Mildred Taylor, an African-American writer who said she was influenced by that picture of Till's body. "I went to college. I was even a history major for a while."
And now there's a chance everyone might learn exactly what happened to Till.
"We know he talked to her (Bryant's wife) and probably whistled at her, we know they kidnapped him, we know they tortured him, killed him and threw him in the Tallahatchie River," Crowe said. "We don't know how he really died or whether it was a gang of men or one man who got really out of control."
Milam and Bryant admitted in a 1956 Look Magazine article that they were guilty. The Constitution prevents prosecutors from charging someone a second time for the same crime.
But Crowe and others, including the creators of two separate documentaries on Till, Stanley Nelson and Keith A. Beauchamp, believe Milam and Bryant covered up the real facts of the case to shield as many as seven other men from the investigation.
The Justice Department announced Monday it would reopen the case.
Till was visiting relatives when he was kidnapped from his uncle's home in Money, Miss., on Aug. 28, 1955, days after he allegedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant at her family's store. Fishermen found his body three days later.
Crowe hopes his novel, and his nonfiction work, "Getting Away with Murder" — both sold nationally by Phyllis Fogelman Books/Penguin Putnam — worked alongside the documentary filmmakers and the NAACP to motivate the Justice Department's decision.
"Mississippi Trial, 1995" won several awards, including the International Reading Association's 2003 Children's Book Award for Young Adult Novels and the Jefferson Cup Award for the best book of U.S. historical fiction.
E-mail: twalch@desnews.com