Why did the murder of a 14-year-old boy and an open casket in Chicago shake the country?

A 14-year-old boy's murder shook the country in 1955 because his mother made sure people could not look away. Emmett Till was a Black boy from Chicago who, in August 1955, was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi. He was accused of flirting with, touching or whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who ran a grocery store there. What happened in the store is a matter of dispute, but his interaction with her, perhaps unwittingly, was taken as a violation of the unwritten code of behavior for a Black male and a white female in the Jim Crow-era South.

Several nights later Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went armed to the house of Till's great-uncle and abducted him. Till was lynched in Mississippi.

His body was sent home to Chicago, where his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, insisted on a public funeral with an open casket. "I just wanted the world to see," she said. Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his open casket, and photographs appeared in Black publications such as Jet and The Chicago Defender, generating intense public reaction.

Then came the trial in September 1955. An all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam. Protected against being tried again, the two men admitted to killing Till in a magazine interview a year later and sold the story for $4,000. Till's murder came to be seen as a catalyst for the next phase of the civil rights movement, and Rosa Parks later said that when she refused to move on a Montgomery bus a few months afterwards, she thought of Emmett Till.