Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old boy who was visiting family in Mississippi when he was accused of flirting with a white woman who worked in a store—when, in fact, all he did was talk to her. The woman’s husband and his brother beat Till up and poked out his eye before shooting him in the head. Then they tied a seventy-pound fan blade around his neck with barbed wire and threw him in the Tallahatchie River where his mangled, swollen corpse was found three days later. The attackers confessed to the newspapers what they’d done, but they were acquitted by the all-white jury.
