Lawsuit seeks white woman’s arrest in Emmett Till’s 1955 kidnapping, lynching

Emmett Louis Till was kidnapped, tortured and killed in the Mississippi Delta in August 1955 after witnesses alleged he whistled at a white woman who was working in a store. The killing energized the civil rights movement, with his mother holding an open-casket funeral in Chicago. (AP Photos)

JACKSON, Miss. — A relative of Emmett Till is suing to try to make a Mississippi sheriff serve a 1955 arrest warrant on a white woman in the kidnapping that led to the Black teenager’s brutal lynching.

The torture and killing of Till in the Mississippi Delta became a catalyst for the civil rights movement after his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago and Jet magazine published photos of his mutilated body.