It all started in August of 1955. Fun-loving, Emmett Till could hardly wait to visit family in Mississippi. The 14-year-old grew up near Chicago and had never ventured far from home. After stern warnings from his mother about racism and social etiquette in the South, he took a summer trip to visit relatives in Mississippi with his great uncle and cousin, Wheeler Parker. That trip and a visit to the local store changed their lives forever. “They came out of the store and Emmett loved to make people laugh – telling people jokes. He wolf whistled right there in front of the store and we could have just died,” said Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., Emmett’s cousin. Later, the husband and brother-in-law of the woman who Emmett whistled at, abducted 14-year-old Emmett from his Great Uncle Moses’s home in the middle of the night. “I heard them coming. In walked this guy- his name was Milam,” said Parker. “He had a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. I was shaking, literally shaking like a leaf on a tree.” Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river. His body was returned to Chicago, where his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket, which was held at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ. It was later said that, "The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till exposed the world to more than just her son”. Her decision focused attention on not only American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy.