David Holmberg has covered major stories for newspapers in New York, Washington, Miami, Philadelphia and other cities for 30 years. He currently teaches journalism at New York University and is a Contributor to www.MaximsNews.com. He has been a senior editor for The Village Voice, where he covered the investigation of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. He has written about the Emmett Till Case for The Nation, Newsday, The Daily News, and The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post. He has also written three novels. See his Bio below.  DavidHolmberg@MaximsNews.com

         UNITED NATIONS -  25 January 2005   www.MaximsNews.com / --  New indictments in the re-opened Emmett Till case are a strong possibility,  and with the recent arrest in the Schwerner-Goodman-Chaney murders there will be inevitable comparisons between the two landmark racist atrocities.

Because it pre-figured the civil rights era, the 1955 murder of  Till is probably more significant historically than the Schwerner-Goodman-Chaney murders in 1964. 

But as retired Mississippi editor Stanley Dearman pointed out to me the other day, the latter case involved organized "armed resistance" to idealistic incursions from the North. 

The Till case essentially involved a redneck reaction to a perceived social violation by an outsider, a 14 -- year-old boy from Chicago on a summer visit to the Mississippi Delta.

 On a moral scale, the two notorious  episodes near the middle of the twentieth century are probably of equal weight. 

Except for the fact that only one youth died in August, 1955 and three were murdered nine years later, how can one gauge the depth of moral disintegration? 

An atrocity is an atrocity, and if "only" a single person dies he or she can under certain circumstances become the kind of catalyzing symbol that Emmett Till has been in the past half-century. (August 28^th of this year will mark the 50^th anniversary of his death.)

One wants to believe that the moral imperative was in  the minds of the Justice Department officials who  decided a few months ago to re-open the Till case. 

Obviously, pressure was put on Justice to do so, but given the Bush administration's professions of moral underpinnings for its Middle East policies, why not give the administration the benefit of the doubt in this situation? 

Maybe, just maybe, a moral vision of an equitable society crossed someone’s mind on a domestic level, for once.

 Because it would be easy in both of these American tragedies to plead the perpetrators innocent or not worthy of indictment by reason of mortality. 

That was the obvious argument in the cases of elderly Nazis after World War 11 --  should those whose death is imminent anyway be forced to languish in jail in their final days, or be executed? 

Would  that represent inappropriate, misguided  vengefulness on society's part?  

In post-war Europe the answer in most cases was no, but we still  heard the same argument the other day from some dissenters to the indictment and arrest in Philadelphia, Mississippi of 80-year-old Edgar Ray (" the Preacher") Killen. 

Photos of Killen before a judge, white-haired and stooped (though anything but contrite),  gave additional credence to that tired formulation.

 I say: Go get 'em.  Granted,  Killen and the possible co-conspirators in the Till case -- if indeed any are out there --  are profoundly vulnerable now. 

As free men, they’ve managed to achieve sufficient age to be feeble. 

But they've achieved old age without punishment because a highly imperfect society didn't have the moral, political, or intellectual wherewithal to bring them to justice years ago.  

So with these old men historically delegitimized even in their own backyards, the criminal justice system shouldn't apologize for their physical and social vulnerability; the ancient conspirators shouldn't be rewarded for their survival in a flawed society.  

The authorities should bring them in if they're still out there, and bring them to justice.

A former Washington Post reporter, Paul Hendrickson, has written eloquently of the moral factor in dealing with the racist murders of the civil rights era, and in the New York Times recently he mentioned an encounter he had in Mississippi in 1984 with one of Killen's alleged co-conspirators.

 Hendrickson was trained in theology, though, and an almost naïve tone sometimes creeps into his reporting on the savage killers of the mid-century South.

 Basically, he asks: how can these men look at themselves in the mirror all the mornings of their lives?

An understandable question, but my answer is: denial is a powerful legal and psychological tool, and don't under-rate It. 

Most of these men have no capacity for repentance. 

Sam Bowers, who is perhaps the most dangerous Southern racist of the last century and who made a significant statement incriminating Killen, is a sophisticated amateur theologian with an intricate rationale for murdering blacks (he did time as a co-conspirator in the Schwerner-Goodman-Chaney case.)  

I've never interviewed Bowers, who's talked to very few reporters, but in 1994 in Ruleville, Mississippi  I had a two-hour confrontation with Roy Bryant, one of the two known killers of Emmett Till.

Byant was no Bowers -- in the summer of 1994 he was  a shambling, cancer-ridden old redneck racist who ran a fireworks store in Ruleville’s black community -- but he parried questions about his role in Till’s murder with a denial mechanism as well-developed as any criminal's or corrupt politician's.

"I never had any trouble with blacks," Bryant said.

"Hell, I got some right here (working in the store) that I guarantee you would fight for me in a minute. 

I don't mistreat blacks and I don’t let them mistreat me."

Bryant said his grocery store in Money, Miss., where Till allegedly "wolf-whistled" at his wife, was boycotted after he and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted of Till's murder. 

“It broke me financially,” Bryant said, and both he and Milam moved to Texas to build new lives.

 The Till case, he maintained that summer afternoon a decade ago,  was "just something in the past." 

He denied his role in the Till murder and repeatedly finessed questions about the confession he and Milam made to a Look magazine reporter after the trial.

But, denials aside, at one dramatic point Bryant's voice rose ominously when I asked him about race relations in the country at the moment. 

He cited the disturbances in Los Angeles at the time of the Rodney King case. He talked about looting there. Then he said: "I’ll tell you what I would have done. 

"I would have shot every SOB who walked out of a store with something in their arms. 

"You wouldn’t have been a man if you hadn't." 

A pause. "Would you?"

Roy Bryant, wasted by cancer and soon to die, fixed me with a challenging stare.

         DavidHolmberg@MaximsNews.com

         David Holmberg has covered major stories for newspapers in New York, Washington, Miami, Philadelphia and other cities for 30 years.  

He covered the AIDS crisis for New York Newsday -- including an international AIDS conference in Stockholm -- and the war in El Salvador for the Philadelphia Daily News. 

He was on Newsday's investigative team for the Donald Manes affair, the major crisis of the Koch administration, and won first prize in the New York City Press Club's annual awards for his coverage of the homeless. 

He covered the Mumia Jamal case for the Philadelphia Daily News, and as national correspondent for that newspaper he also reported on vote fraud in Mississippi and the trial of Miami police officers growing out of the Liberty City riots. 

While in Miami, he wrote about anti-Castro bombings and the treatment of Haitian immigrants in the Bahamas. 

He has been a senior editor for The Village Voice, where he covered the investigation of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination. 

He has written about the Emmett Till Case for The Nation, Newsday, The Daily News, and The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post. 

For the Post; he obtained the last interview with Roy Bryant, the confessed murderer of Till. 

He was a Ford Foundation fellow in African studies at Columbia University, and has written three novels. 

His short story, "History," dealing in part with 9/11, was published in The Paterson Literary Review in 2003.  

He currently teaches journalism at New York University and is a Contributor to www.MaximsNews.com

Photo by Ryan Mercer.

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