The summer before 14-year-old Trent Lott entered all-white Pascagoula High School in Mississippi, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till convinced his mother to let him go down South to try cotton-picking with his cousins.

"Bo," she said to her naïve son, unaware of the ways of the South, "if you see a white woman coming down the street, you get off the sidewalk and drop your head. Don't even look at her." But just about a week after Till arrived at his great-uncle's home in Money, Mississippi, that summer of 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley got word that her only child may have whistled at or insulted a white woman clerking at the Bryant store in town, and was missing, assumedly kidnapped. A few days later, Till's grotesquely disfigured body, with one eye dangling down the cheek, a smashed nose, a bullethole through his ax-sliced head and a "choked-out" tongue, washed ashore in the Tallahatchie River.

Mobley insisted on opening her son's casket to the public and media, horrifying Northern blacks and whites; the tragedy helped inspire Rosa Parks to refuse to move to the back of the bus, kicking off the Montgomery bus boycott and helping spark the onset of the civil rights movement.

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