Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till

While visiting family in Mississippi in August 1955, Emmett Till allegedly whistled at a white woman working behind the counter of a crossroads country store. Her husband and brother-in-law kidnapped the fourteen-year-old Chicago kid in the middle of the night and tortured, beat, and shot him. Three days later, his body rose from the Tallahatchie River, a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.

Confronting her son's nightmarishly disfigured face, Mamie Till-Mobley decided that ...