Lynching of Emmett Till

Date: August 28, 1955 • Location: Leflore County, United States

African-American teenager Emmett Till was lynched near Money, Mississippi, for allegedly flirting with a white woman, energizing the nascent American civil rights movement.

Emmett Louis Till was an African-American boy who, at 14 years old, was abducted and lynched in Mississippi in 1955. The brutality of his murder and the acquittal of his killers drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.