On this day, August 28, in 1955

African American teenager Emmett Till was brutally murdered while visiting his uncle in Money, Mississippi. Emmett Till was from Chicago and was not directly accustomed to the intensity of racism in the Deep South. Following an accusation that he spoke "inappropriately" to a white woman, Emmett Till was kidnapped by two white men, beaten relentlessly, then tied with barbed wire to a cotton-gin fan and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. Although his body had been brutalized beyond recognition, Till's mother decided to have an open casket funeral which gained public attention and stunned the world. What's possibly even more shocking is that both of the murderers were acquitted by an all white jury.