(born 1941); d, 1955 Fourteen-year-old African American Chicagoan who visited his uncle in Mississippi for the summer of 1955. Unfamiliar with the racial code of the South, he spoke casually to a married white woman in a store, and received retribution at the hands of the woman’s husband and his half-brother. Unlike countless lynchings that either went unrecorded or never resulted in a case against the lynchers, the Till case went to court owing to the bravery of his uncle who was willing to identify the assailants. While the two defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury, the national attention the case received and the outrage the verdict unleashed helped to mobilize many African Americans and northern white liberals who joined the Civil Rights movement.