(CNN) A sign memorializing Emmett Till, who was brutally murdered 63 years ago, has been vandalized -- again. 
 
 It's the third sign to go up at the site outside Glendora, Mississippi, near where the 14-year-old's body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in 1955. And it was installed just 35 days before it was pierced with bullets. 
 
 The people who put it up might just leave it that way. 
 
 Patrick Weems, co-founder of the county-supported Emmett Till Interpretive Center , said the community has ignored Emmett's vicious murder long enough. 
 
 "For 50 years, our community lived in silence, and there's those who want to erase history," he told CNN. "We've been through that." 
 
 The marker's rough past 
 
 Emmett Till's memorial signs have seen trouble from the start. 
 
 
 
 Eight years later, its replacement was The first sign went up along the river in 2007, 52 years after Emmett's death. In 2008, it was stolen, Weems said. Nobody ever found it.Eight years later, its replacement was riddled with bullet holes in multiple acts of vandalism, Weems said. That sign now sits in the interpretive center's museum. 
 
 And last month, the third sign was put up near the river. Only 35 days went by before it was shot up. A professor from nearby Delta State University found the sign defaced by bullet holes, Weems said. 
 
 "Whether it was racially motivated or just pure ignorance, it's still unacceptable," he told CNN. 
 
 No one seems to know who's responsible for the incidents. Two spokespeople from the Tallahatchie County Sheriff's Office did not know of any arrests or findings made related to any of the signs. 
 
 The second version of the memorial sign in 2016. 
 
 What Weems does know is that the sign is about two miles down a gravel road -- a bit of a trek from town -- and shooting it was no accident. 
 
 To Weems, it's a sign of systemic racism the area has long struggled to combat. 
 
 "It's a stark reminder that racism still exists," he said. 
 
 A killing that shook a nation 
 
 It was the summer of 1955 in the Jim Crow South. Emmett, more affectionately known as "Bobo" by the people who loved him, had traveled to Mississippi from Chicago to visit his great-uncle. 
 
 Once there the teen was falsely accused of flirting with Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year-old at the time. Bryant and her husband, Roy, owned a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. 
 
 Four days went by. Then, in the middle of the night on August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, paid Emmett a visit. 
 
 They rousted him from his bed and ordered him into the bed of a pickup truck. They beat him mercilessly. Then they took his life by shooting him in the head. 
 
 To get rid of Emmett's body, his killers strapped a 75-pound cotton gin to his neck with barbed wire. That way he'd be weighed down when they threw his battered body in the Tallahatchie. 
 
 Bryant and Milam went on trial less than a month after Emmett's body was pulled from the river. There were eyewitnesses who saw them. The men admitted they had kidnapped Emmett. 
 
 That evidence wasn't enough. Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all-white jury. 
 
 The grimmest part: a year later, his killers confessed. Double jeopardy laws let them get away with it without facing another trial. 
 
 But his death horrified the nation -- Emmett's mother insisted on an open-casket funeral so "all the world" could see what was done to him -- and helped spark the embers of what became a nationwide civil rights movement. 
 
 How the community is moving forward 
 
 The Mississippi community's made a lot of progress since then, Weems said, but there's still plenty of work to be done. 
 
 Moments like these are defining, he said. There are two options: letting the vandalism divide a community that's already divided by opinions, politics and races. 
 
 Or, he said, it can help get things back on track. 
 
 "It's difficult to celebrate anything when you know there's so much work to go," he told CNN. "But we still keep coming back to the table." 
 
 Part of moving forward, Weems said, involves protecting Emmett's history. 
 
 For one, the National Park Service is considering designating sites related to Till's lynching as national park areas. With this designation, defacing the signs would become a federal felony , and federal funds could buy cameras to keep a watchful eye on the sites. 
 
 Another part, Weems said, is getting justice for Emmett. 
 
 "It's never too late to have justice," Weems told CNN. ||||| Mr. Parker said the sign should be replaced. So did Annie Wright. Her husband, Simeon Wright, was 12 and sharing a bed with Emmett, his cousin, when he was kidnapped. 
 
 “I would keep putting it up, and someone is going to get tired after a while,” Ms. Wright, whose husband died last year, said by telephone. “It’s hatred. It’s all I can say.” 
 
 Mr. Weems said that two companies in New York had agreed to design and create a new sign made out of steel, which would be much stronger than the current one, made of a thinner metal. The companies will supply it for free, he said. 
 
 For all that Emmett’s case came to signify in the United States, it was largely ignored in the part of Mississippi where he died. There was a highway marker with his name on it, but that too was vandalized when the letters KKK were spray-painted across it. It was later completely covered in black paint. 
 
 Mr. Weems said that in the decades after Emmett’s death, people in the Mississippi Delta region wanted to forget about the crime and act as if it never had happened. While that sentiment holds true with some people there, he said, most people in the area have voiced support for preserving Emmett’s story in the historical markers. 
 
 “In truth, this is a story about a local community — black and white, Republican and Democrat, plantation owners and former sharecroppers — that came together and took responsibility,” Mr. Weems said. 
 
 No one has been caught for defacing the sign in previous years. The Tallahatchie County sheriff did not return a phone call on Monday about the latest act of vandalism. 
 
 “My sense is that it only takes one person to do this,” Mr. Weems said.
– The scene of an infamous criminal act has once again been vandalized. The New York Times charts the recent history of the sign that has marked the spot where Emmett Till's body was in 1955 pulled from the Tallahatchie River; the 14-year-old had been lynched after a white woman said he whistled at her. In 2007, a sign was erected at that spot and seven other places significant to his murder. But that riverside sign's history has been a fraught one: It was stolen and never recovered, reports CNN, and the replacement has been on the receiving end of more than 100 bullets over the years. A fresh sign went up in June and sat there, unscarred, for 35 days. On July 26, four bullet holes blighted the sign once more. One bullet pierced the word "mother," in a sentence referencing Mamie Till Mobley's desire "not to bury her son" but return him to his hometown Chicago. Patrick Weems, co-founder of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, says the very nature of the sign's location suggests the shooting was intentional: One has to travel about two miles down a dirt road to get to it. In the wake of the incident, Weems says he's accepted an offer to have a fourth sign made, for free and out of steel, which is superior to the metal that's previously been used. Till's case was closed in 2007, but the Justice Department reopened the case earlier this year after receiving "new information." The DOJ didn't elaborate, but the development followed the 2017 publication of a book that quotes Till's accuser, Carolyn Bryant Donham, as admitting she made up the worst parts of her story. More of her comments here.