Emmett Till's Murder and Open-Casket Funeral Galvanize Civil Rights Movement

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi on August 28, 1955, by white men who accused him of whistling at a white woman. His mother Mamie Till-Mobley insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago, and the photographs of his mutilated body published in Jet magazine shocked the nation and the world. The acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury and the subsequent public outrage radicalized a generation of civil rights activists and is considered a pivotal catalyst for the movement.