Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African-American teenager from Chicago who was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, in August of 1955 when visiting relatives in the segregated south. Till allegedly flirted with a white woman in a store and was later murdered by the woman's husband and his brother, who beat and shot Till and deposited his body in a local river, where it was found three days later.

Till's mother, Mamie Till Bradley, chose to display her mutilated son's body in an open casket in an emotional funeral service in Chicago that was attended by thousands of people. Mamie Till Bradley bravely made this decision to show the world how people had murdered her young son, who was also allegedly a bit developmentally disabled and who certainly did not understand race relations in the racially segregated town of Money, Mississippi (as Emmett Till had grown up in Chicago). Pictures of Till's mutilated body were shown in African-American publications such as Jet, and they raised sympathy among whites and African-Americans and raised awareness of racism and lynchings in the south.

The case is regarded as a milestone in the development Civil Rights Movement, as whites and African-Americans across the nation were motivated to take action against the brutality of the segregated system in the south. Many people were incensed by the acquittal of the two white men, who later admitted to killing Till. In December of that same year, 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began under Martin Luther King to protest segregation on that city's buses, marking the first major victory of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The movement was a loosely organized network of different kinds of activists who used protests, sit-ins, voter registration drivers, and the courts to break down the system of segregation and the infringement of African-American rights in the United States.