The historical sign marking where Emmett Tills body was found in the Tallahatchie River in 1955 has been riddled with bullets.
Since the Emmett Till Memorial Commission put up eight markers in Tallahatchie County in 2008, the sign near the river has been a repeated target of vandals.
Its one of a number of civil rights markers and symbols that have been vandalized in Mississippi over the past decade.
These are easy targets, a low-risk outlet for racism, said Dave Tell, an associate professor at the University of Kansas who is part of the Emmett Till Memory Project.
Some people mistakenly see civil rights monuments as a form of reverse discrimination, a threat to their own well-being, he said.
On Sept. 23, 1955, an all-white, all-male jury acquitted half-brothers Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam of Tills murder.
Months later, the two men confessed to Look magazine they had indeed killed Till.
Four days after Rosa Parks heard a speech on Till, she boarded a bus in Montgomery, Ala., on Dec. 1, 1955, and refused to give up her seat to a white man.
The Emmett Till case propelled the civil rights movement, said Devery Anderson, whose book on the case is now being made into an HBO miniseries being produced by Jay-Z, Will Smith, Casey Affleck and Aaron Kaplan.
After Emmett Till Memorial Highway was dedicated along a 32-mile stretch of U.S. 49 East in 2006, vandals painted KKK on the Emmett Till highway sign.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...-marker-mississippi-riddled-bullets/92577674/
In came you don't know, Emmett Till was an African-American teenager who was lynched in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman.
Till was from Chicago, Illinois, and visiting relatives in Money, a small town in the Mississippi Delta region. He spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Several nights later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went to Till's great-uncle's house and abducted the boy. They took him away and beat and mutilated him before shooting him and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river.
His mother had an open casket funeral to show how badly they mutilated her son.