Emmett Till's body to be exhumed; maybe Southern Studies wasn't just a waste

I remember sitting in my Southern Studies class last fall thinking about how bored I was and how the professors (both of whom are from the North) called out all White southerners as racists as we talked about one murder and civil wrong after another after another.

One such event we studied was the brutal slaying of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black who was beaten to death in August of 1955 and thrown in the Tallahatchie River in the Mississippi Delta. His multi-day wake and funeral was covered by the national media and turned all attention to the civil rights struggle that was still taking place in the South. Although an all-white jury found the accused murderers innocent, the men later admitted in an interview with a national magazine to killing the boy.

Today, almost 50 years later, the FBI announced that Till's body will be exhumed to collect DNA evidence and see if they can determine who was to blame for his murder. It's a cold case that should be reexamined. The murders of three people in Neshoba County in 1964 was recently reinvestigated after a series of stories by The Clarion-Ledger, and a grand jury handed down an indictment for Ed Killen late last year.

So, while I still believe that my Southern Studies profs last fall were a little ignorant in their assertions about racism, it did happen. And if a life was taken, the person who committed that crime should be held accountable.