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Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris Perry.

On August 28, 1955, two adult white men, Roy Bryant and J. W. Malam, kidnapped 14-year-old Emmett Till at gunpoint from his uncle's home in Money, Mississippi. It was the middle of the night.

Bryant and Malam beat and shot Emmett. They used barbed wire to tie a cotton gin fan to his neck,

and they threw him into the river.

When Mamie Tilmobly received her son's remains,

the child was disfigured beyond recognition.

And she made a choice so vulnerable and courageous, it altered the course of history.

At her insistence, for five days, Emmett's mutilated body lay in an open casket. More than 50,000 people

visited the Southside Chicago Church where he lay, and millions more

saw the shocking photos of the brutalized boy in Jet Magazine.

All wore witness to the stomach-churning realities of Bryant and Malam's racist violence. When people saw what had happened to my son,

men stood up who had never stood up before.

People became vocal who had never vocalized before.

Emmett's death was the opening of the civil rights movement. He was the sacrificial

lamb of the movement. Her steel spined courage launched a movement for justice, but Mamie

Till Mobley never received even a modicum of

accountability for the murder of her son. In 1955, an all-white Mississippi jury refused to

...