On August 20, 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago, boarded a southbound train to visit his uncle in Leflore County, Mississippi, near the town of Money. For purportedly whistling at a white woman in a grocery store, he was kidnapped, brutally beaten, and shot to death. His mangled corpse, with a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan tied to the neck, was pulled from the bottom of Tallahatchie River on August 31. NAACP Southeast Regional Director Ruby Hurley, Mississippi Field Secretary Medgar Evers, and Amzie Moore, president of the Bolivar County branch in Mississippi, initiated the homicide investigation and secured witnesses. Hurley sent her reports to the FBI and The Crisis. The NAACP issued this press release the day after Till’s body was found.
On August 20, 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago, boarded a southbound train to visit his uncle in Leflore County, Mississippi, near the town of Money. For purportedly whistling at a white woman in a grocery store, he was kidnapped, brutally beaten, and shot to death. His mangled corpse, with a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan tied to the neck, was pulled from the bottom of Tallahatchie River on August 31. NAACP Southeast Regional Director Ruby Hurley, Mississippi Field Secretary Medgar Evers, and Amzie Moore, president of the Bolivar County branch in Mississippi, initiated the homicide investigation and secured witnesses. Hurley sent her reports to the FBI and The Crisis. The NAACP issued this press release the day after Till’s body was found.