WaPo: “The Justice Department has closed the latest federal investigation into the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till in rural Mississippi, a case that horrified the country and galvanized the civil rights movement.
Till, a Black 14-year-old visiting from Chicago, was murdered after he was accused of whistling at and making sexual advances toward a White woman, Carolyn Bryant, during an interaction at Bryant’s grocery store in Money, Miss.
Federal authorities reopened the case three years ago, after a new book reported that Bryant had denied in an interview that Till had made any advances. In theory, that could have meant she lied in decades-old court proceedings.
But Justice Department officials said Monday that when the FBI questioned Bryant about those alleged statements to the book’s author, she said she did not make them, and the author’s interview tape and transcripts do not show her making such statements.”