After Sykes and Burger began the drive back to Kansas City, Beauchamp called Mamie, learned about her two visitors, and in turn called Burger’s number and spoke with Sykes. At first, Beauchamp was hesitant to say much about his efforts and explained that he had recently started working with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
“Really?” asked Sykes. “Are you working with Ted Shaw?”
“Yes!” replied Beauchamp, surprised that Sykes knew the name.
Sykes then suggested that Beauchamp call Shaw, who would vouch for him and put Beauchamp at ease. When Beauchamp did so, he got a good report. Shaw’s connection to both men allowed him to alleviate any concerns either would have had. Shaw suggested that the men work together, and a relationship began.66
Sykes and Burger had already thought about proceeding under the umbrella of the Justice Campaign of America, which for nineteen years had functioned broadly on victims’ rights. That organization had grown out of the old Steve Harvey Justice Campaign. Upon further thought, however, they opted instead to form the Emmett Till Justice Campaign, with Beauchamp and Till-Mobley as the other two founding members. Sykes would take on the role of coordinator, and Mamie agreed to serve as chairperson. She also approved Sykes’s role as her advocate, which included the responsibility of speaking on behalf of the family in the new quest for justice. On January 4, 2003, Sykes called to tell Mamie that the organization had been launched and provided other details.
Two days later, on January 6, Sykes called the Mississippi attorney general’s office to determine what it would take from its perspective to reopen the case. He arranged for a conference call for later that day with Sykes, Beauchamp, Till-Mobley, and Special Assistant to the Attorney General Jonathan Compretta, so that the office could verify directly with Mamie that she backed a new investigation and supported Sykes as her advocate. Sykes called Beauchamp and asked him to pass this on to Mamie. Meanwhile, Sykes made other calls in preparation for the conference call.67
Mamie had a busy schedule planned for the remainder of the week. She was to leave the following day for Atlanta, where she was scheduled to speak at the Ebenezer Baptist Church as part of its weeklong closing ceremonies for the exhibit “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.” She was upbeat as she talked to a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution a few days ahead of her visit. “I’ve got to write my book. To me, the time has come, and I can’t wait any longer.” She was optimistic about the reality of a new investigation into her son’s murder, which “would be the fulfillment of a dream I have had since I left the courtroom. Justice at last will prevail.”68
Beauchamp, who would be traveling to Atlanta as well to screen Untold Story at Ebenezer on Saturday, called Mamie before she left for a dialysis treatment and informed her of the planned conference call for later that day, explaining what the state attorney general’s office wanted from her. She was clearly pleased with the news.
“Keith, I told you that you were going to get this case reopened,” said Mamie with excitement. She looked forward to seeing Beauchamp in Atlanta.69
Sykes waited patiently all day for a response from Beauchamp so that the group could coordinate the time to place the call. Several hours passed, but nothing came. Beauchamp finally called later that evening, and the news he had was devastating.
“She’s gone,” said Beauchamp, almost in shock.
Sykes was confused. “Who’s gone?”
“Mrs. Mobley. She died today.”70
Mamie had been en route to her dialysis appointment with a family member when she became ill. She was rushed to Jackson Park Hospital, where she died of heart failure at 2:30 P.M.71
Nobody who knew and loved Mamie Till-Mobley was prepared for her sudden death, but the timing made it seem all the more tragic. The momentum for reopening the Emmett Till case had been accelerating, and the dedication of others to see it through was firmly in place. Now, the woman who had inspired it all would no longer be part of the journey. Nor would she see the release of her memoir. Chris Benson received the news of Mamie’s death while at home working on the book. He called Mamie’s home to ask her a routine question but instead was told by her cousin, Airickca Gordon, that Mamie had died. He was still in shock when Mamie’s attorney, Lester Barclay, called to encourage him to continue. “She was able to close her eyes and rest in peace knowing that this was going on,” he said. Benson called William Morris, his agent, and told him the news. Morris wanted to know if Benson had learned enough from Mamie to continue. Benson assured him that he had, and the two agreed to talk more the following day, along with Benson’s editor at Random House. During the meeting they agreed to carry on. Rev. Jesse Jackson, a close friend of Mamie, was also there and offered his help. Benson asked him to write a foreword to the book, and Jackson agreed.72
Continuing on was not as easy at first for Beauchamp. Meeting and forming a relationship with Mamie had been life-altering for him, and now, unfortunately, so was losing her. For a time it was almost too much to bear, and he fell into a serious depression. All he could do that first night was lock himself away and write a poem about his beloved mentor.73
In his first words to the press after Mamie’s death, Beauchamp sounded determined to proceed. Despite his grief, he assured one reporter, “I’m going to go forward with this and definitely get this case reopened.” Privately, however, he no longer had it in him. He could not view any of his footage and lost all desire to finish the film. As Beauchamp put it, “I was done.”74
As shocking as Mamie’s death was for Sykes as well, he saw the moment as Mamie’s passing of the torch. She had begun this effort herself years earlier, and had just given her nod of approval for others to go with her into the trenches. Sykes and Burger pleaded with Beauchamp to pick up and continue. Beauchamp at first refused but urged the two men to keep working if they wanted to. Should they continue, it would be without him or his unfinished film. Sykes and Burger persevered, however, and their words struck Beauchamp hard.
“If you give up, you’re giving up on Mrs. Mobley.”75 Indeed, it was up to those Mamie had entrusted to turn her vision into reality.
Beauchamp forced himself back into his work, but the first screening of Untold Story nineteen days after Mamie’s death was painful. The screening originally slated for Atlanta on January 11 had been postponed due to her sudden passing but was rescheduled for Saturday, January 25. The 125-seat visitor center theater filled to capacity, forcing staffers at the facility to set up a second screening room where they showed the original thirty-minute version of the film.76
As Beauchamp saw Mamie appear on screen, his emotions got the better of him and he broke down. After the screening, he pulled himself together and told the audience about his and Sykes’s efforts to persuade Mississippi to reopen the murder case. In fact, Sykes and Ted Shaw, of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, planned to carefully scrutinize all of Beauchamp’s findings in order to assemble a theory of prosecution. Once that was developed, they would pass that on to the offices of both the Mississippi attorney general and Department of Justice.77 Federal involvement was desirable over the state going it alone, primarily because the federal government could provide the funds for a vigorous investigation.
As Sykes and Beauchamp began working together without Mamie, Nelson’s The Murder of Emmett Till gave the case unprecedented publicity, which certainly helped the cause. The film was screened at New York’s Gramercy Theater on January 8. On the 17th it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Salt Lake City, where it won a Special Jury Award. Three days later, on January 20, 2003, it had its first airing on PBS’s The American Experience. The following September, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, the film received the ultimate recognition when Nelson and Marcia Smith won an Emmy in Directing for Nonfiction Programming.78
On April 28, 2003, Beauchamp and Sykes screened Untold Story at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. This opportunity came after someone with the organization reached out to Beauchamp with an
invitation.79 The Washington meeting was important because Beauchamp and Sykes, along with Donald Burger and Ted Shaw, were scheduled to meet the following day with Ralph Boyd Jr., assistant US attorney general for civil rights.
Sykes wanted to be ready with answers before meeting Boyd. Prior to the trip to Washington, Sykes tried to clear a few hurdles both with the Till family and the federal government, and these would need resolution before going forward. As Sykes dug deeper into the case, he learned that Emmett Till’s cause of death had never been definitively determined; the death certificate noted that Till died either from a gunshot wound or an ax. An autopsy had never been performed but would be a crucial step in a murder investigation. This was important not only to determine how the victim died, but the defense had maintained during the 1955 trial that the body was not even that of Emmett Till. That argument would need to be demolished for good. Yet there had already been some rumblings among Till family members who were opposed to the idea of disturbing the body, even if an examination could lead to solving the case.80
Sykes tried to alleviate these concerns immediately and contacted the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC in a quest to obtain referrals for private forensic pathologists. He was given the name of Dr. Mehmet Yaşar İşcan, professor at the Institute of Forensic Sciences in Istanbul, Turkey, about performing a privately funded examination of the body. Should the government take on the case, an exhumation and autopsy would occur regardless of how the family felt about it, but Sykes thought relatives would be more supportive if they could be in on the procedure. İşcan had worked in the Chicago area and was familiar with local officials, facts that also might be comforting to the family.81 “I have made a request to the family for both permission for the examination and that you perform the operation,” Sykes wrote in an email to İşcan. Sykes had already assured the family that the process would not incur any costs to them personally, but to fully persuade them, Sykes needed information regarding the fees involved and for İşcan to provide an opinion as to why the examination would be necessary. Sykes also wanted to present this information to Department of Justice officials during the April 29 meeting following the Press Club film screening.82
İşcan responded that he could do the autopsy for $300 per hour and that the entire process, including the exhumation, would take about four days. İşcan, who had performed autopsies all over the world, assured Sykes that “the remains will provide any injury made to the body and the type of weapons that cause[d] that injury. It can make a distinction between innocence and third degree murders. I believe that if a gun is used and yet no autopsy is made, we can still recover the bullet and assess how it enter[ed] the body. This may even be possible even if it did not hit the bones assuming that remains are not moved later or dismembered.” If a bullet penetrated Till’s body, “we can reconstruct the way the victim was standing at the time of shooting in relation to the assailant. The skeleton can provide a better explanation of events and cause of death as long as it is shot by a weapon.”83 Continuing opposition from the Till family kept İşcan’s services from ever being utilized, but they learned what possible answers the procedure could uncover. Sykes kept preparing for the day when they would be forced to deal with this issue once again.84
Sykes had been anticipating another problem and wanted to go to Washington armed with solutions. He foresaw issues that would thwart a federal probe because the statute of limitations for federal charges had expired back in 1960, five years after the crime had been committed. He and Beauchamp had theorized that one way to get the federal government involved was to prove that the gun used to kill Emmett Till was a military weapon issued to J. W. Milam when Milam served in the army. In his 1955 interview with William Bradford Huie, Milam boasted that his .45 pistol was the “best weapon the Army’s got.” Another option was to look into the highways used to transport Emmett Till, and to determine whether they were federally owned.85
Neither one of these ideas panned out, but Sykes thought that the best approach would be for the federal government to partner with Mississippi voluntarily to investigate the case. After the National Press Club screening, Sykes talked with his old friend Richard Roberts, by then a judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Roberts, who attended the event, referred Sykes to a July 28, 1976, opinion of Antonin Scalia that established federal jurisdiction for an investigation into the Kennedy assassination. This same opinion was later used in 1998 to open the door for federal officials to look into the death of Martin Luther King Jr.86
Scalia, who was later appointed to the US Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, was a forty-year-old assistant attorney general in 1976 when he penned his memo, “Jurisdiction of the Department of Justice to Investigate the Assassination of President Kennedy.” Scalia concluded that public interest was still served when the Department of Justice investigated a crime, even when no one could be prosecuted on federal charges, as long as investigators could detect that a crime had indeed occurred.87 Sykes, Beauchamp, Burger, and Shaw then passed this opinion on to Assistant Attorney General Boyd. Boyd came to the meeting certain that establishing federal jurisdiction would be difficult, if not impossible, due to the expiration of the statute of limitations. Sykes, however, used the Scalia opinion as the “in” that the Department of Justice needed. Jurisdiction for any prosecution would remain with the state. Boyd accepted this reasoning and got on board.88
On May 13, two weeks after the Washington meetings, Beauchamp and Sykes presented Untold Story in New York at the Dag Hammarskjold Auditorium to the 200 delegates to the United Nations (UN). Gordon Tapper, a friend of Beauchamp and chief of special services at the UN, arranged the event with the help of UN attorney Catherine Caxton. Sykes explained the short- and long-term goals of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign, which expanded far beyond the Till case alone. “First, we are seeking to reopen the investigation into Emmett Till’s death,” he said, “and secondly, we are seeking to have the Federal Hate Crimes Law modified to bring all racially motivated crimes under Federal jurisdiction.”89
Sykes was still facing opposition from Till family members about the realization that Emmett Till’s body would need to be exhumed and examined should the case be reopened. In June, he traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, and sought out Charles Evers, brother of Medgar Evers. Charles Evers agreed to write a letter to the Till family urging them to finally support the idea of an autopsy. Evers knew firsthand how important this step would be because a June 1991 exhumation and examination of the body of his brother aided the prosecution in finally gaining a conviction of Medgar’s killer, even though an autopsy had been performed in 1963. Unfortunately, the record of that first procedure had been lost.90
More attention came to the Till story when, in October 2003, Random House released Mamie Till-Mobley’s long-awaited memoir, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. Coming nine months after her death, its publication was bittersweet. Chris Benson finished the work that had begun at Mamie’s request in the summer of 2002. During their last meeting together six months later, Mamie told Benson that telling her story to him “has been cathartic for me,” and that she was able to reach a new level regarding her own feelings. “I see why it has taken so long,” she said, appearing at peace about the project she had envisioned for so many years. Benson and the historian Tim Black were well aware of the void created by her absence as they introduced the book in Chicago on Thursday, October 16, at an event at the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library attended by Mamie’s family and open to the public. The auditorium was full.91 Death of Innocence went on to win the Robert F. Kennedy Special Recognition Book Award in 2003 and the following year was awarded the BlackBoard Nonfiction Book of the Year Award.
Beauchamp continued to screen Untold Story on college campuses, to civil rights organizations, and to just about any group that would have him. Mamie had given him some advice early on that stuck with him. If he hoped to bring about a new investiga
tion, she insisted, he would need to have the media and those with political power squarely behind him. To spur that on, Beauchamp resolved that whenever the public saw news about Emmett Till, they would see Beauchamp’s name also.92
Sykes remained busy as well. In addition to his travels, he spent the year writing letters and emails and making phone calls.93 All of these efforts resulted in a formal review of the case by the state of Mississippi in February 2004. One of Sykes’s many phone calls went to John Hailman, a federal prosecutor in Oxford, Mississippi, who had been with the US attorney’s office since 1974. By 2004, he was chief of the Criminal Division and, as such, he handled all civil rights cases. Sykes introduced himself and told Hailman that he had met with Ralph Boyd in Washington the previous April and was fully aware that the statute of limitations had run out on the Till case. “However, [Boyd] said your office had a good reputation in civil rights circles and that you might be willing to help persuade the state DA to reopen the case if the FBI will agree to investigate it.” Sykes was “calm and low-key but persistent,” recalled Hailman. Sykes explained that the trial transcript was missing and that both men who had been tried and acquitted for the murder were dead. However, a good investigation might produce sufficient evidence to prosecute others who were involved. “If not,” Sykes said, “at least the family and the nation would finally know what really happened.”94
Hailman promised Sykes that he would look into the matter further and get back to him. Before they hung up, Sykes told Hailman that he wanted an in-person meeting with the FBI and the district attorney who would have jurisdiction over the case.
Hailman talked to colleagues Jim Greenlee, US attorney for northern Mississippi, and Hal Nielsen, FBI supervisor. Both were doubtful that a probe into a case as cold as the Till murder would yield much, if anything, yet they agreed to listen to what Sykes had to say. Hailman also called Joyce Chiles, district attorney over Mississippi’s Fourth Judicial District, to let her know about this renewed interest in Emmett Till.95 Should the case be reopened, Chiles’s office would ultimately decide whether to indict and then prosecute.
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