The Story of Emmett Till

In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy, was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, for supposedly whistling at a 21-year old white woman at a local store, Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market. The only child of Mamie and Louis Till, Emmett begged his mother to let him visit relatives in the South, which she finally agreed to in the summer of 1955. On August 21, Emmett and his friends were playing outside by a street corner when Emmett took out his wallet and bragged that he had white friends from his integrated school in Chicago, Illinois. One of the boys dared Emmett to go inside the store and talk to the white lady behind the counter, which he did. However, what was said in the store is disputed, with Mrs. Carolyn Bryant claiming to have been harassed and wolf-whistled at while other reports testified that Emmett spoke with a stutter and may have made a whistling sound in his pronunciation when he was nervous. The woman went to get a gun, and the boys left soon after when an old man warned them that it might cause trouble. Mrs. Bryant told her husband about the incident when he came back and the story spread. On August 28, the two murderers, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, kidnapped, beat, and shot Emmett before dumping his body into the Tallahatchie River. However, they were acquitted by the all-white jury and, with double jeopardy protecting them from being re-tried, later even bragged about the murder in a magazine interview. Thousands of people attended Emmett's funeral or viewed his casket and the story was published in black magazines and newspapers. Emmett Till's murder is widely considered as a catalyzing event in the Civil Rights Movement, rallying popular black support and white sympathy across the country.

Further Reading

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmjustice5.html
http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/early-civilrights/emmett.html