Emmett Till

Julian Bond
civil rights leader and chairman, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Emmett Till and I were about the same age. A week after he was murdered... I stood on the corner with a gang of boys, looking at pictures of him in the black newspapers and magazines. In one, he was laughing and happy. In the other, his head was swollen and bashed in, his eyes bulging out of their sockets and his mouth twisted and broken. His mother had done a bold thing. She refused to let him be buried until hundreds of thousands marched past his open casket in Chicago and looked down at his mutilated body. [I] felt a deep kinship to him when I learned he was born the same year and day I was. My father talked about it at night and dramatized the crime. I couldn't get Emmett out of my mind...
Muhammed Ali
boxer
See the grisly photo of Emmett Till's corpse that had such an impact on Ali. Be advised -- it is a graphic image.
It was only in later years, through exposure to civil rights history, that many of our generation who grew up in the deep South learned about Emmett Till's murder.
Television was in its infancy in the mid-1950s, and many homes didn't have one. If they did, they only got local stations. Most newspapers in states like Alabama and Mississippi did not even report on incidents like the Till murder. In fact, the Montgomery Advertiser did not send reporters to cover the Voting Rights March between Selma and Montgomery -- and that was in 1965!