This is the BBC World Service. You're listening to the extended podcast version of the

ballads of Emmett Till.

I saw his body disfigured out a place barbed wire around the neck eyes gouged out one shot or two inhale by soft tissue

stomp straight on another down south Saturday the bones and black flesh peeled back flush into the veins of simmer money Mississippi summer

or whatever you call the Chicago boy turning another river to blood.

So how did this little boy case have such an impact?

An investigation into the infamous murder of the black teenager, Emmett Till, has been reopened by the United States government.

The investigation into the 1955 murder of Emmett Till.

Emmett Till was 14 years old when he was kidnapped, tortured and killed by a group of white men.

After white woman accused him of making lewd remarks and touching her.

This story has been told in so many different ways, supposedly factually, and it's also been told in literature and poetry and...

What does one do with all of that, with all those different tellings.

And the tale, just a boy of 14 years.

Am it till, and the tear.

Quite a lifetime of tears.

More than 60 years after his murder in Mississippi, Emmett Till still haunts America.

Canonized then and now in songs and poems, plays and films.

He's the boy whose death awakened a generation of activists, and he's

rising once again as the first black life that mattered for whom justice was never done.

Till is emerging as a representation of all that has not changed, a figure who remindsuyled Surprise Winner, Living in Chicago.

Studs Tucker, W.F. M.T. Radio, 1961.

It's the story, of course, of the murder of Emmett Till.

...