Victim Emmett Till

The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago was one of those revolting, chilling Deep South stories of the pre-civil rights era. Till was brutally murdered by parties known yet never convicted in a small town in Mississippi.

Young Till was visiting relatives in Money, Miss. in 1955. With a few local African-American boys, he visited a local store to buy some candy. His companions dared him to speak to Carolyn Bryant, a young woman who, with her husband, owned the store.

Accounts differ about whether Till whistled at her to made some kind of flirtatious remark, but three days later, the woman's husband and another man kidnapped Till from his uncle's house, beat and shot him and weighted down his body, which they dumped into the Tallahatchie River--a river later publicized again in a song by one-hit wonder Bobbie Gentry.

Till's uncle identified the two white men who abducted Emmett, but the all-white jury predictably found the men not guilty.

Till's mutilated remains were taken back to Chicago for burial, and an open-casket service allowed some 50,000 people to see what had happened to the boy. Emmett Till's dreadful demise infuriated the black community and sickened most decent whites. His killing is regarded as one of the important precursors that motivated the drive for equal rights for all Americans.