Murder victim and civil rights figure.  Emmett Till's death at the dawn of the American Civil Rights Movement may have catapulted action to change history. He was a young African American native of Chicago, Illinois, who was visiting relatives in the Deep South state of Mississippi. Emmett did not understand the profundity of racism there and dared to address an attractive white woman named Carolyn Bryant in a grocery store. He went in, bought some candy, and on the way out allegedly said "Bye, baby." One observer claimed he had only whistled at her. He did not know that he had broken an unwritten code of behavior for a black male interacting with a white female in the Jim Crow South. A couple of days later, the woman's husband and his brother-in-law abducted him from the home he was visiting and drove him to the Tallahatchie River where they made him strip, beat him, gouged out one of his eyes, and shot him in the head. His body was thrown into a river with a 75-pound metal fan attached to his neck with barbed wire. When his body was recovered by the authorities, he was so badly disfigured that he could only be identified by a ring that was initialed. Authorities wanted to bury him quickly, but his mother insisted that he be sent back to Chicago. When she viewed his remains, she decided to have an open-casket funeral to show the public what the killers had done to her only son. When a picture of his corpse was published in Jet magazine and other publications, Black Americans collectively were indignant about the brutality of his death. Till's killers were acquitted by an all-white Mississippi jury, and Black America as well as major newspapers throughout the country condemned the verdict. The case became a catalyst for the youth of the 1950s to pursue the Civil Rights efforts of the 1960s. His killers were protected by double jeopardy, and they later sold their story to Life Magazine and finally admitted to the crime. In 2011, a historical marker was placed at the site of the grocery store where the incident took place. This marker told the tragic story and publicly identified his murderers as Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. Emmett Till met his tragic demise at age 14 in 1955.