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Emmett Till

Money, Mississippi

Leflore County, Mississippi

Where fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was abducted from his uncle Moses Wright's home around 2:30 a.m. on August 28, 1955 by Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam. They tortured, shot, and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River with a 75-pound cotton-gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Mamie Till-Mobley's decision to hold an open-casket funeral and permit Jet magazine to publish the photographs of her son's mutilated body confronted the country with the reality of racial terror. The all-white, all-male jury acquitted Bryant and Milam in 67 minutes. They confessed to the killing in a paid 1956 Look interview.

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