Emmett Till's Long Shadow
"The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till," a film by Keith Beauchamp, who, like Mr. Benson, is haunted by an image of the murdered boy in an open coffin.

"Of the thousands of lynchings that occurred since Reconstruction, the one name everybody remembers is Emmett Till," said Mr. Benson. "It burned the race problem into our consciousness, the first international coverage, the first real media event of the modern civil rights movement. And no one ever had to pay."

In the written history of the crime, it is more base than that. Some people said Emmett wolf-whistled at the woman behind the counter, after telling some friends that black men could be friendly with white women up north.

But Mrs. Mobley doubts that. If her theory about what happened is true, then the killing is even more monstrous than ever believed.

"At age 5, he came down with polio," Mrs. Mobley said of her son. "He would go out and play every day, and at night he would burn up with fever. The doctor told my mother to quarantine the house."

He recovered, but "he hesitated in his speech, and then he developed a full stutter," she continued. "We wanted him to be able to express himself and not take all day doing it. I started teaching him various speeches, like the Gettysburg Address and the Preamble to the Constitution. And when he would stutter, I would just say, `Just whistle,' because the whistling relieves the tension."

She believes he was just tongue-tied as he came out of the store after buying a piece of bubble gum, and he whistled, and a few days later Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam beat him to death for it.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/weekinreview/01BRAG.html?pagewanted=all&position=top