Emmett Till

Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy, was brutally murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after allegedly 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 posthumously became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement.

Read full obituary from The New York Times →