Till's interaction with Bryant, perhaps unwittingly, violated the unwritten code of behavior for a black male interacting with a white female in the Jim Crow-era South. Although what happened at the store is a matter of dispute, Till was accused of flirting with or whistling at Bryant. He spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the white, married proprietor of a small grocery store there. During summer vacation in August 1955, he was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region. Till was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.
The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National MonumentĮmmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store.Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.
