Report: DNA confirms body is Emmett Till's
By Laura Parker, USA TODAY
DNA testing has confirmed that the body buried in Emmett Till's grave is the 14-year-old who was slain in Mississippi a half-century ago, just as his mother and relatives have said these long years, the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger reported Thursday.

Emmett Till was killed Aug. 28, 1955, several days after he whistled at a white woman.
AP file
The results come as Till's relatives plan to mark the 50th anniversary of the murder that galvanized the civil rights movement by laying a wreath at Till's grave on Sunday.
Till's body was exhumed from a suburban Chicago cemetery on June 1 as one of the last tasks in a federal investigation of his death. The probe was renewed last year after a New York filmmaker suggested there were other participants in the murder who have never been charged.
The Till case is one of several high-profile civil rights cases that have been reopened in recent years. It also helped spur a bill in Congress that would establish a "cold case" unit in the Justice Department to investigate old civil rights cases.
"If we're not willing to look back into the past to find out the truth about what happened, we really can't move into the future with any hope for healing," said Sen. James Talent, R-Mo., one of the bill's authors. Talent said Thursday that he hopes the Senate will approve $5 million to launch the unit.
Since 1989, authorities in seven states have re-examined 29 killings from the civil rights era, leading to 27 arrests and 22 convictions. The most recent case was in Philadelphia, Miss., in June when a jury convicted Edgar Ray Killen, 80, of manslaughter for orchestrating the 1964 killings of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman.
Till's relatives said Thursday that they have not been advised of the DNA test results. But Simeon Wright, a cousin, said the family has never had any doubt.
Till was killed Aug. 28, 1955, several days after he whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, outside a store in Money, Miss., she operated with her husband, Roy.
The teen was dragged from his bed at 2 a.m., beaten, shot and thrown into the Tallahatchie River, weighted down by a heavy fan from a cotton gin that had been tied around his neck. Photographs of his badly bruised body were published in Jet magazine, and the outrage that resulted helped spur civil rights activists.
Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, identified her son when his body was returned to Chicago a week after his death. Till's father's distinctive ring was on the teen's hand.
"I was the one to identify the ring that was taken off the body," Wright said Thursday. "Those who didn't believe it are holding their head in shame now."
Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted a month after they were charged with Till's murder. The all-white jury deliberated for an hour. In 1956, the two men confessed to a writer for Look magazine that they had killed Till. But they could not be prosecuted again. They have since died.
Aside from the forensic value Till's identification has for the new investigation, it is also salve on a painful wound the family has endured for 50 years.
The jury foreman said one reason why the two men went free was that the body was never officially identified. The sheriff testified during the trial that he couldn't positively identify Till. Over the years, a mythology grew that Till had left Mississippi and run away.
"The DNA test was useful for discounting these urban legends," says David Beito, a University of Alabama professor who has written extensively about the Till case.
"But anybody with any credibility at the time accepted that was Emmett's body, including the sheriff. He gave the body first to Moses Wright (Till's great-uncle) and then to a black funeral parlor. He later claimed the body was as white as he was, but he didn't think that when the body was found."
Although scientific identification of Till was a necessary step, it does not help establish that anyone else is culpable in Till's murder. Historians who have interviewed many of the people surrounding the case doubt charges can ever be brought.
Carolyn Bryant now lives in Greenville, Miss. Testimony at the 1955 trial suggested she might have been at the house with her husband and Milam the night Till was kidnapped. But there are no known witnesses who could place her there or at the scene where Till was murdered.
Another man, Henry Lee Loggins, now 82, is the elderly farmhand who worked for Milam. Loggins has long insisted he had nothing to do with the killing but gave details to filmmaker Keith Beauchamp that suggested he knows more about the events that night than he has said publicly.
Loggins' son, Johnny Thomas, is now the mayor of Glendora, Miss. He requested immunity for his father so his father could tell authorities all he knows. It's not clear how much the ailing Loggins can reveal. He has said repeatedly he knows nothing about that night.
The FBI has said it will conclude its investigation this fall and present its finding to Joyce Chiles, the district attorney in the three-county area where Till's kidnapping and murder occurred.
She would decide whether to file murder charges. The statute of limitations for kidnapping or any other charges has expired.
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