Jackson Free Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Panel discussions, a march for justice and other events are being held in Mississippi to remember Emmett Till.

Friday marked 65 years since the Black 14-year-old from Chicago was killed in the Mississippi Delta.

Till spent the summer of 1955 visiting relatives in Mississippi and was kidnapped, tortured and killed after whistling at a white woman working at a store in a rural community called Money.

His mutilated body was found in the Tallahatchie River three days after white men abducted him from his uncle’s home.

Till's death galvanized the civil rights movement when his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago to show the world what had happened to her son.

An all-white jury in Mississippi acquitted two white men who were charged in his killing, and the men later confessed to the crime in a Look magazine article.