Essays on Emmett till

July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955

Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till’s murder became a rallying point for the civil rights movement that followed.