A sign in Mississippi that marks the location where the body of black teenager Emmett Till was found in 1955 after he was lynched, shot, and tortured, has been pierced by four bullets since it was erected July 26, The Washington Post reported.
It is the third sign erected after the first was stolen and the second was destroyed by gunfire.
"We didn't deal with the root reasons in 1955, and we're still having to deal with that," said Patrick Weems, co-founder of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center. "The same systems that allowed these signs to be vandalized are the same systems that allowed Emmett Till to be murdered."
Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, was killed after he was accused by a white woman of whistling and attempting to grab her inside of a store in Money, Miss. Decades later, Carolyn Bryant said she had made the story up. The woman's husband and her brother made Till carry a 75-pound cotton gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River, ordered him to take his clothes off and then beat him nearly to death. They gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and threw his body in the river.
Both men went on trial, but the all-white jury issued a verdict of "not guilty" because they said they believed the state had failed to properly prove the identity of Till's body.
Photos from Till's open-casket funeral sparked outrage nationwide, and the trial was an early impetus of the African-American civil rights movement.
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