On September 2, 1955, a train from Mississippi arrived in Chicago carrying the body of 14-year-old Emmett Till. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, had sent her only child south to spend the summer with relatives in Money, Mississippi. Instead, he returned home in a coffin after becoming the victim of one of the most infamous acts of racial violence in American history. Days earlier, Emmett had entered Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, where an encounter took place with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman working inside. Exactly what happened has been disputed for decades, but Emmett was accused of behaving improperly toward her. In Jim Crow Mississippi, even an accusation involving a Black boy and a white woman could carry deadly consequences. During the early morning hours of August 28, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam abducted Emmett from the home of his great-uncle, Mose Wright. His badly mutilated body was discovered three days later in the Tallahatchie River, weighted down with a heavy cotton gin fan. When Mamie finally saw her son, she made a decision that transformed private grief into public testimony. She insisted on an open-casket funeral, famously explaining that she wanted the world to see what had been done to her child. Tens of thousands of people came to Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago to mourn Emmett and witness the consequences of racial terror for themselves. Photographs of his mutilated body were later published by Jet magazine and circulated throughout Black America. The photographs were difficult to look at, but that was precisely the point. Mamie understood that Americans could debate racism in the abstract while ignoring what it actually did to human beings. By refusing to hide her son's body, she forced the country to confront a reality Black families had understood for generations. Emmett was not simply the victim of two men. His murder took place within a system where segregation, disenfranchisement and racial violence had created an environment in which Black lives could be taken with little expectation of justice. The trial made that painfully clear. Mose Wright entered a segregated Mississippi courtroom and identified Bryant and Milam as the men who had taken Emmett from his home. For a Black man in Mississippi in 1955 to publicly accuse white men of murder was an extraordinary act of courage. Yet an all-white, all-male jury acquitted both defendants after deliberating for little more than an hour. Protected from being tried again for the same murder, Bryant and Milam later admitted their involvement in a paid magazine interview. Emmett Till's murder did not begin the Civil Rights Movement. Black Americans had been organizing against segregation and racial violence for generations. But the national outrage surrounding his death helped give new urgency to that struggle. Rosa Parks later recalled thinking about Emmett Till when she refused to surrender her bus seat in Montgomery that December, an act that helped ignite the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Mamie Till-Mobley could not choose what happened to her son, but she chose what America would be allowed to forget. She spent much of the rest of her life educating people about Emmett, speaking publicly and working with young people. Her decision to open that casket ensured that his murder could not be quietly buried with him. Nearly seventy years later, we still know Emmett Till's name because a grieving mother understood the power of making the world look at a truth it would have preferred not to see.