Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, had her son’s body brought to Chicago for the funeral. After seeing her son’s mutilated face, she insisted on an open-casket funeral. “I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby,” she said. Photographs of Till in his casket, with his face visible, appeared in "Jet," an African American-owned magazine, and soon shocked viewers around the world. In spite of the fact that Moses Wright bravely identified one of the killers in the courtroom, an all-white jury took little more than an hour to acquit Bryant and Milam. Bryant later admitted to the killing in a Look Magazine interview.

The savage beating death of a 14-year-old African American boy named Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi August, 28, 1955, horrified much of the world and did much to mobilize the Civil Rights Movement in the second half of the 1950s. A Chicago native, Till traveled south to visit his extended family in the Mississippi Delta when, one week into his trip, he and several friends were standing outside a white-owned grocery in the tiny town of Money. Till told his unbelieving friends that he had several white friends in the North, including friendships with white girls. The friends dared him to go inside the store and flirt with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who worked at the cash register. Accounts conflict on what happened next, with some claiming he whistled at Bryant, others that he reached for her hand and asked her out, while according to a third version