Still Divided 

"If you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust/Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind is filled with dust."

-- Bob Dylan, "The Death of Emmett Till"

It was a reminder, a soul-chilling echo from the Mississippi Delta. "Emmett Till, Emmett Till. We'd kill you still, we'd kill you still." Till was a black kid, 14 years old when two white men savagely tortured and murdered him. That was August 1955.

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• John Sugg
• Emmett Till's lynching began at Bryant's Grocery in Money, MS.

But the hateful echo across the town square of Sumner, MS, rang out on a 107-degree day in September 2005. Five kids in a red pickup spied a group of journalists and scholars who'd trekked to the town's courthouse where 50 years earlier an all-white jury had acquitted two white men who later, in Look magazine, boasted of killing Till.

The lynching, along with Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, AL, bus, almost four months later, ignited the Civil Rights Movement. Those two incidents -- a crime of hatred and a quiet statement of courage -- lit a conflagration of social and political change in America.

In the following decades, Jim Crow, the legal embodiment of the South's segregated society, disappeared -- almost. Officially, schools are now integrated. Blacks occupy positions of power, from municipal offices to the nation's secretary of state. Workplaces are legally color blind. Mixed-race couples seldom turn heads anymore.

Perhaps most symbolic of change, racists who committed murders decades ago and escaped punishment at the time have seen their cases reopened. In the same region where Emmett Till's killers went free, integrated juries have convicted a handful of race terrorists for long-ago crimes. For many of the killers, justice was delayed -- but it finally arrived (see the sidebar "Healing old wounds").

Still, there's that haunting echo in Sumner.

Would Emmett Till be killed today for, as his killers claimed, whistling at a white woman? Probably not.

Racial violence is far from just a subject for history books, however. Southern whites no longer rise in murderous rage at the cry "nigger," often the prelude to a lynching. But more subtle appeals to prejudice can suppress equal justice and equal opportunity just as deeply.

You don't have to dig deep to find those appeals. Just spin the right-wing-dominated AM radio dial and you'll hear harangues virtually indistinguishable from those that drove white mobs into the streets seeking black victims in past generations.

Last October, the Atlanta-based talk-show host Neal Boortz likened the plight of poor (and mostly black) Hurricane Katrina victims from New Orleans to "emptying a septic tank into the nation's water supply." In December, he (incorrectly) predicted mayhem in Los Angeles following the execution of a black gang leader, proclaiming, "The rioting, of course, will lead to wide-scale looting. There are a lot of aspiring rappers and NBA superstars who could really use a nice flat-screen television right now."

That rivaled US-Education-Secretary-turned-moralizing-pundit Bill Bennett, who in September announced, "If you wanted to reduce crime ... you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

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• John Sugg
• Till's killers were acquitted by an all-white jury in the Sumner, MS, courthouse.

The words echo the message that Klan leaders and Southern politicians used decades ago to isolate African Americans as different and somehow less human than other Americans.

"It's overt racism, the type that's only a few steps away from inciting violence," says Donald Jones, a University of Miami law professor. "They are saying blacks are naturally prone to rape and atrocities. Blacks are beasts. How do you deal with beasts? Kill them."

"Every day more and more people are openin' their eyes to see the only thing wrong with this country is we've gone against the laws of nature. God's law. Only the strong have a right to survive. And now, finally, those not worthy ... the Jew, the African, he who lies with another man ... they're all diggin' their own graves."

-- Klan leader Rollie Wedge, a character in John Grisham's The Chamber

Willie Simmons is a Mississippi state senator and owner of Senator's Place, a soul food restaurant in the Delta town of Cleveland.

"I beat a white guy who had been in office 29 years," Simmons says. "That shows you how much things have changed for some people. But if you ask me, there is much left to be done for most [African Americans]. In many ways, we're seeing reversals. The governor is seeking to decrease funds to public schools, which in this state means funds for black children. We may be going backwards."

Simmons is clearly a success. So are Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, Michael Jordan, Denzel Washington and many other African Americans.

But for most blacks, a society in which race doesn't hold them back is still a distant goal. All things are not equal by a long shot. In many areas -- access to loans, health care and even the amount of face time black candidates get in the media -- the racial fault lines determine that blacks are treated less favorably than whites, regardless of income or social class.