My name is Frank Thompson, born in Arkansas, educated at Arkansas.

When I grew up, it was of course a segregated south.

But I was quite fortunate.

I was raised in a very loving family.

My parents were together.

We were involved in the church.

So we had our social outlets through our church.

We were brought up in a very cohesive black community.

And quite frankly, I think I really became alive on a social issue setting when Emmett

Till was killed.

In 1955, Emmett Till was visiting family in Mississippi when a white woman accused him

of whistling at her in her family's grocery store and making sexual advances.

A few nights later, the woman's husband and his half-brother kidnapped, tortured, and

shot 14-year-old Emmett Till.

They tied a 75-pound industrial fan around his neck and through his body into a river.

A month later, both men were acquitted by an all-white jury.

Frank Thompson remembers it well.

He was 13 years old, just a year younger than Emmett Till.

Oh boy, you know, every mother, every father related to having lost a child, that's one

level.

Even though there had been lynchings all across the South, Emmett Till's death just sort

of punctuated the sensitivities to where even though Christians are against killing, I

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