Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Emmett Till. His tragic murder in 1955 is a monumental moment in civil rights history.

The African-American teenager was tortured, shot, wrapped in barbed wire, and tossed in a

river by white men seeking revenge. For what? Till had allegedly whistled at a white woman in a

grocery store. When Till's mother, Mamie Elizabeth Till Mobley, viewed his lifeless body, swollen beyond recognition, his teeth missing, an eye hanging out.

The only thing she could use to positively identify him was a ring he was wearing.

Lord, take my soul, she cried, according to a 2003 interview with the

Washington Post. In her grief and outrage, Till's mother wanted the world to see the barbaric

act committed against her son. She called the Chicago Defender, one of the country's leading black newspapers.

She called Ebony and Jet Magazines too. And she invited them to his funeral on the south side of Chicago.

Then Mamie did something that would change history.

She asked for an open casket at his funeral.

I think everybody needed to know what happened to Emmett Till, his mother said, according to PBS.

50,000 people attended the funeral and saw Till's body, the evidence of a vicious and hateful attack.

Though open caskets were an African American tradition, Till's body presented challenges not just in how he appeared, but also, and this is hard to say, how badly it smelled.

Simeon Wright, Till's cousin, told Smithsonian Magazine that the funeral home scrambled for a solution,

finally settling on the extraordinary step of putting glass over the casket to contain the odor.

Otherwise, Wright said, no one would have believed what Till endured.

The result was profound.

The emotional photos from the funeral showed Mamie as she approached her son's casket.

Her body seemed to buckle.

Photographers captured her leaning over the casket to which photos of the smiling boy have been taped inside the lid.

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