Emmett Till

Emmett Louis Till was fourteen years old when he was lynched in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955, murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made the agonizing decision to hold an open-casket funeral in Chicago, insisting the world see what hatred had done to her son. Tens of thousands filed past his casket. Jet magazine published the photographs. The nation could no longer look away.

Born in Chicago in 1941, Emmett was a lively, outgoing boy who loved baseball and practical jokes. He traveled to Mississippi that summer to visit relatives — a routine trip to the rural South that countless Black families made. The brutality of his murder and the subsequent acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury in just 67 minutes became a catalyst that accelerated the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks later said that she thought of Emmett Till when she refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery just months later. His death, and his mother's courage in making it visible, transformed private grief into public reckoning. In 2022, Congress passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime — sixty-seven years after his murder.