Yesterday, the Department of Justice reopened the investigation of the murder of Emmet Till, a young black man who was killed in 1955 for whistling at a white woman. According to Till's mother:

I saw a hole, which I presumed, was a bullet hole, and I could look through that hole and see daylight on the other side, and I wondered, was it necessary to shoot him?

The two men who were originally charged were acquitted. Years later one of the men admitted to the murder in a magazine interview. Both are dead.

The purpose of the investigation is to determine whether the circle of guilt is larger than originally believed, according to Assistant Attorney General Alexander Acosta:

If indeed others are implicated and they can be identified, they can still be prosecuted. While the five-year federal statute of limitations in effect in 1955 has since expired, prosecution can still be brought in state court.

I won't pretend to know something about this case--this is obviously something in which my insider-as-outsider routine does not work. I had never heard of Emmett Till until yesterday. But I am aware that a number of investigations that impinged upon the issues of racial injustice and the civil rights movements have been reopened, much to the nonchalance of the American public.

Events of this nature can spur difficult reconsideration of past events. There is no end to the disinterring of the Holocaust in Germany, and that has led to other outbursts of remembrance (Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung) and reparations (Wiedergutmachung) on the part of government to more distant victims (like the Herero and Nama). Switzerland and Japan are two more difficult cases. Switzerland was brought to confession by immense public pressure, reforming its laws to examine dormant accounts and paying Holocaust victims. Japan, while apologizing for the Rape of Nanking and the sexual enslavement of Koreans, has been writing its atrocities out of its history books in a new wave of nationalism. Its World War II is back to being a war against western imperial powers. France has come a long way in taking responsibility for the crimes of Vichy, a government they do not consider to be legitimate. Today, Geitner Simmons points out one of the most long lasting cases of amnesia: the insistence by Austrians that they were the first victims of the Nazis rather than participants in the Holocaust.

How can the remembering, or forgetting, of the treatment of African-American be understood? The trial of the Montgomery Church Bombers received scant attention. I would hope that Americans would embrace this issue more: more than Japan, but not necessarily as contrite as Germany. I would hope that the reassessment of the past could capture the American imagination as much as issues that are currently hot.