“Let the people see what they did to my boy

That’s what Emmett Till’s mother said after she saw her 14-year-old son’s mutilated body in 1955.

Mamie Till-Mobley had never intended to become an activist, but she knew that her child was far from the only victim of lynching in Jim Crow America. And she felt that a public funeral would force people to confront the ugly reality of racially-motivated murders.

Over Labor Day weekend, nearly 100,000 mourners viewed the boy’s body in an open-casket service in Chicago.

Till-Mobley also permitted a photographer to take pictures of Emmett’s face and distribute them to African American magazines and newspapers so people across America could see him as well.