One seemingly harmless minute, in a backwoods country grocery store in rural Mississippi,

dramatically changed the course of Emmett Till's life, set it on a path to be destroyed.

And with his destruction, set an entire nation's civil rights movement into motion.

Emm was just 14 years old, and on summer break before his eighth grade year, he came to

Mississippi from Chicago to visit his family.

Before he left, his mother had anxiously warned him that he would need to be careful,

and to still strictly segregate it in racially hostile environment of the deep south, and

she was right to be scared.

For just one minute, give her, take a handful of seconds.

On August 24th, 1955, Emmett Till was alone in a store with a white woman.

What exactly happened inside that store will never be known.

Stories changed over and over through the years, but the story initially told by Carolyn

Bryant, the store owner who interacted with Emmett that day, led to his death.

On August 28th, Carolyn's husband Roy Bryant and his half brother, J. W. Millham, with

an unknown number of accomplices kidnapped Emmett Till from his uncle's home in the middle

of the night.

They drove him to a barn, attempted to beat him into submitting to what they decided his

place was.

And when the results of the beating didn't satisfy them, they took him to the banks of

the tally hatchy river where he was shot in the head.

The men then tied a cotton gin fan to his neck with barbed wire and cooling through his

lifeless body into the river.

...