aug 28, 1955 - Lynching of Emmett Till

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Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African-American boy who recently moved to Mississippi from the North, was lynched in 1955 for offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. Simply saying “Hey Baby” to a white woman, the woman’s husband and her brother took Till to the Tallahatchie River where he was beaten nearly to death, the two men finally threw Emmetts body into the Tallahatchie River, tied to the seventy five pound cotton-gin fan he carried there wrapped in barbed wire. Three days later, his body was recovered at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. On September 23, the all-white jury decided the verdict “not guilty” in less than an hour. Emmett Till's murder was a spark in the upsurge of activism and resistance that became known as the Civil Rights movement.

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