Emmett Louis Till, born on July 25, 1941, was a 14-year-old African American boy who was tragically kidnapped, brutally tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955. This occurred following allegations that he had offended Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, in her family's grocery store. The extreme violence of his murder and the subsequent acquittal of his assailants brought national focus to the persistent and violent oppression of African Americans in the United States. In the aftermath of his death, Emmett Till became a symbol of the civil rights movement.

Emmett Till, originally from Chicago, Illinois, was visiting family near Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region during his summer vacation in August 1955. While there, he encountered 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, a white woman and the married owner of a small grocery store. The exact nature of their interaction in the store remains a subject of debate, but Till was accused of either flirting with, touching, or whistling at Bryant. This interaction, whether intentional or not, breached the rigid and unspoken social norms of the Jim Crow-era South regarding conduct between black males and white females.

A few days after the incident, Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband, and his half-brother J. W. Milam, both armed, abducted Till from his great-uncle's home. They brutally beat and mutilated him, then shot him in the head, and disposed of his body in the Tallahatchie River. Till's severely disfigured and swollen body was found and recovered from the river three days later.