Emmett Till

In 1955, a precocious 14-year-old black boy from Chicago casually made a comment or gesture to a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store as he and several friends were on their way to a relative’s home following a long day of picking cotton.

The woman considered Emmett Till’s actions to be flirtatious and told her husband, who became infuriated. In the middle of the night several days later, the husband and another man burst into the house where Till was staying, abducted the youth and tortured him hours before shooting him and throwing his body – weighted with a cotton gin fan tied with barbed wire around his neck – into the Tallahatchie River.

Till’s mutilated and unrecognizable corpse was pulled from the water two days later. He was positively identified only by a ring he wore with his father’s initials, “L.T.” Mamie Till had her son’s body shipped back to Chicago, where she held an open casket funeral, from which pictures of Emmett’s grotesque body were broadcast nationwide.

Let the world see

The open casket was “to let the world see what has happened, because there is no way I could describe this. No way,” Till said.

Within a week of the murder, the two men — both white — were arrested and charged with Till’s death. Both were later tried and acquitted by an all-white, male jury; blacks and women were not allowed to serve on juries. The jury deliberations lasted a little more than an hour. Some jurors felt the men were guilty, but said the death penalty or life imprisonment were not fitting punishments for whites who killed a black person.

Knowing that double jeopardy laws protected them from a retrial, both men later admitted to the murder and abduction during a magazine interview for which they were paid $4,000.

Till’s death proved to galvanize and serve as an impetus for the civil rights movement. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called Till’s murder “one of the most brutal and inhumane crimes of the 20th century.” Two years later, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was passed, which allowed the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene in local law enforcement issues when civil rights are compromised.

And within four months of Till’s death, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the “colored section” of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white passenger after the white section became filled. Her arrest sparked a yearlong boycott of Montgomery buses by black riders.

“I thought about Emmett Till and I couldn’t go back [to the back of the bus],” Parks said.

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice reopened the case and exhumed Till’s body as part of their investigation. Nothing became of the new investigation and Till was reburied in a new casket. His original casket was donated to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.