For almost 50 years, Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, has asked the president of the United States and the attorney general to correct a shameful miscarriage of justice. Her son, Emmett, a 14-year-old African-American, was murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a White woman.

Initially, Till’s mother appealed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Attorney General Herbert Brownell and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover for help. They refused. So did every subsequent president, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative. Bill Clinton wouldn’t help. And nor would George W. Bush. Not until now. Not until five months before the next presidential election. Not until a year after Mobley Till went to her grave without having seen justice served.

Emmett Till’s death was a tragedy. The second tragedy is that the Justice Department’s announcement last week that it will finally look into the possibility of re-opening the Till case is what one former White House aide called TL-square: Too little, too late.

Shortly after they were acquitted for murdering young Till, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, admitted to writer William Bradford Huie that they had abducted Till, shot him in the head and thrown him into the Tallahatchie River.

Writing in Look magazine, Huie said Milam told him: “Well, when he [Emmett] told me about this White girl he had, my friend, that's what this war’s about down here. That’s what we got to fight to protect. I just looked at him and I said, ‘Boy, you ain’t never going to see the sun come up again.”

Bryant and Milam were poor White trailer park trash. There was never any doubt about their guilt and no one believed for one scintilla of a second their story that they snatched young Till from his great uncle’s house, only to let him go unharmed. Rather frown on the heinous murder of an unarmed teenager, the good ol’ boy network protected Bryant and Milam. The sheriff helped the defense attorneys select jurors. All five members of local bar served as defense attorneys.

An hour and seven minutes after leaving the courtroom, the all-White, all-male jury returned with a not-guilty verdict. No one was surprised.

The amazing thing about that ordeal was the courage displayed by African-Americans, knowing that they, too, could suffer a similar fate. Till’s aging great uncle had the nerves to identify Milam and Bryant in open court. Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, dressed as a field hand and went from plantation to plantation to locate reluctant witnesses. Journalist James Hicks and Ruby Hurley, a field representative for the NAACP, slipped into Milam’s barn, where Till had been beaten and shot, looking for evidence. Some witnesses pretended to be dead and left Mississippi in caskets so that they could return later to testify against Milam and Bryant.

They took such bold actions knowing that they were risking their life.

Just three months before Till’s murder, Rev. George Lee, who became the first Black to register in his county, was killed in Belzoni, Miss., apparently to dissuade other African-Americans from following his lead. Even though he had been shot in the face with a blast from a shotgun, Lee’s death was ruled a traffic accident. No one was ever arrested.

A week before Till arrived in Mississippi, another African-American, Lamar Smith, was shot to death in front of the courthouse in Brookhaven, Miss. He had recently voted in the state’s Democratic primary. Again, no one was arrested for his murder.

Now contrast that courage with the cowardly behavior of national, state and local officials.

William Bradford Huie initially said there were four White men involved in the murder of Till. We know that two of them – Bryant and Milam – lived and died without ever being punished. The most that can be expected from this investigation is that those two persons will be belatedly brought to justice. Don’t be surprised if several Black farm hands that worked for the murderers are implicated as well. They were ordered to clean up the mess that was created in the aftermath of Till’s bloody death and at least one is believed to have accompanied Bryant and Milam when they abducted Till.

Even at this late date, I am glad the case is getting a second look. It saddens me, however, that that elected officials over the years didn’t have a modicum of the courage that Blacks in Mississippi demonstrated from the outset.