Emmett Louis Till was an African-American boy who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after flirting with a white woman.
Emmett and his cousins were in the parking lot, chatting, and Emmett bragged to his cousins that he had a white girlfriend back in Chicago.
One boy suggested to Emmett go inside the store and talk to the white woman who was running the cash register, especially if he was so good with white women.
Bryant’s Grocery, owned by a white couple, Roy and Carolyn Bryant, sold supplies and candy to a primarily black clientele of sharecroppers and their children.
So Emmett did go into the store and purchase bubble gum. Carolyn changed her story on several occasions about what happened, suggesting at various times that he said, "Bye, baby," made lewd comments or whistled at her as he left the store.
A few days later, Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, and his half-brother J. W. Milam kidnapped Emmett Till from his home. They brutally beat him, took him to the edge of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, fastened a large metal fan used for ginning cotton to his neck with barbed wire, and pushed his body into the river.

His lynching galvanized the Civil Rights Movement as activists dedicated themselves to ending the conditions that had led to Till's death.

Unfortunately, Emmett's killing was only one of thousands of similar murders in the South, and his name is not well-known. But the case was an important turning point in America's civil rights struggle.

For the first time, blacks had the law on their side in the struggle for equality. Emmett's killing struck a cord across a nation. White people in the North were as shocked as blacks at the cruelty of the killing.