Emmett Till

Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, in the summer of 1955 when he was accused, on since-disputed grounds, of offending a white woman in a local grocery store. Days later, he was abducted from his great-uncle's home in the middle of the night, brutally beaten, and murdered.

His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made the decision that would change the trajectory of American history: she insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago, allowing the world to see exactly what had been done to her son. Photographs of Till's disfigured body were published in Jet magazine and newspapers nationwide, forcing a national reckoning with the brutal reality of racial violence in the American South.

The two white men charged with his murder were acquitted by an all-white jury after barely an hour of deliberation, and later openly confessed to the killing in a paid magazine interview, protected from further prosecution by double jeopardy. The injustice of the case became a defining early spark of the modern civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks later said she thought specifically of Emmett Till when she refused to give up her bus seat months later. His case remained a touchstone of the movement for decades, and in 2022 the US Congress passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, finally making lynching a federal hate crime nearly 70 years after his death.