The FBI is about to exhume the body of Emmett Till, a young man murdered a half century ago in the deep south. Till was resting in a cemetery in the Chicago suburb of Alsip, IL before Federal Agents probed the peaceful earth with their shovels to locate the corpse. Authorities erected a white tent where friends and family of Till gathered for a memorial service. Then workers brought in a backhoe and started digging overnight to expose the concrete vault holding his remains.
Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi 50 years ago when it is claimed he whistled at a white store clerk. He was later kidnapped in the middle of the night and found several days later in the Tallahatchie River. He had been tortured and shot. There was a trial of several suspects followed by an expected acquittal. No autopsy was ever done.
The purpose of the exhumation is reportedly to determine the cause of death and more importantly, to investigate whether additional people beyond the men originally tried for the killing may have been responsible. Even with additional evidence, prosecution of those responsible may be difficult if not impossible, since many men previously implicated in the murder have since passed away and those still alive are just hanging on at age 75 and above.
TKID4 for one is resting easy knowing the FBI is devoting its strained resources to studying a murder that occurred 50 years ago rather than hunting down domestic terrorist cells which are at this minute planning to attack unguarded nuclear power plants across the nation. I can forgive the Bureau for bumbling the entire pre-911 investigation of Al-Qaeda activities at flight schools leading to the deaths of over 2500 people as well as two wars, but I will not rest until the G-Men painstakingly exhume the body of James Dean to determine whether he really did die while driving his porsche recklessly one evening in 1955, or....if it was murder.
In other news, the FBI is considering digging up the mass grave at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, to understand exactly how those injuns died. One theory holds that several dozen U.S. Army Officer's rifles discharged unexpectedly into the crowd of unarmed Native Americans due to a French manufacturer's design defect. If proven true, hopefully this new evidence would exonerate the U.S. Government from years of accusations that it conducted a systemized campaign of genocide versus Native Americans and allow for the privatization of Federal Indian Reservations and the utilzation of its inhabitants cheap labor supply.
