WASHINGTON - The body of a 14-year-old black youth killed in 1955 in Mississippi reportedly after he whistled at a white woman, will be exhumed in coming weeks for an autopsy, court sources said Thursday.
The murder case of Emmett Till, which helped launch the US civil rights movement, was reopened last year after new information came to light including a documentary by Keith Beauchamp.
Federal authorities will exhume the body, buried near Chicago, so that an autopsy can identify the precise cause of death, prosecutor Joyce Chiles said.
The youth, who had been raised in the north where racial tensions were less intense, was visiting an uncle in the south. When he stopped in a local store he reportedly whistled at the young white wife of the white owner.
Abducted in the middle of the night a few days later. Till's disfigured body was found in the Tallahatchie River days later.
The store owner and his half-brother were acquitted of the crime by an all-white jury. But the documentary indicated they might have had accomplices, who if still alive could face charges, according to the Justice Department.
05/05/2005 15:01 GMT