On August 9, 2014 August 28, 1955, Michael Brown Emmett Louis Till , an African-American boy who was murdered in Missouri Mississippi at the age of 18 14 Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson drove up to Brown and a friend, Dorian Johnson, and ordered them to move off the street and onto the sidewalk. An altercation then took place between Brown and Wilson through the window of the police car. after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was from Chicago, Illinois, visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region, when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store there. . A shot was fired from within the vehicle and Brown and Johnson began to flee. Wilson left his vehicle, fired his pistol at Brown and confronted him. Wilson then fired several shots at Brown, fatally wounding him. Witness reports Brown was on his knees with his hands up when Wilson shot him multiple times. Several nights later, Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went to Till’s great-uncle’s house. They took Till away to a barn, where they beat him and gouged out one of his eyes, before shooting him through the head and disposing of his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighting it with a 70-pound (32 kg) cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Brown’s body is left lying in the middle of the street for four hours. Three days later, Till’s body was discovered and retrieved from the river.

Till’s body was returned to Chicago. His mother, who had raised him mostly by herself, insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket to show the world the brutality of the killing. “The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till’s bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused attention not only on American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also on the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy”. Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his casket and images of his mutilated body were published in black-oriented magazines and newspapers, rallying popular black support and white sympathy across the U.S. The shooting sparked unrest in Ferguson due to longstanding racial tensions in one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States. Protests, and other forms of social unrest continued for more than a week, with night curfews being imposed and escalating violence by State Police Department. Intense scrutiny was brought to bear on the condition of black civil rights in Mississippi, with newspapers around the country critical of the state. .Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who nearly 40 years ago suffered a fractured skull as police officers attacked civil rights protesters with dogs and billy clubs in Selma, Alabama, denounced the police treatment of protesters and journalists in Ferguson, recommended the federalization of  the Missouri National Guard to protect citizens from police brutality. . Although initially local newspapers and law enforcement officials decried the violence against Till and called for justice, they soon began responding to national criticism by defending Mississippians, which eventually transformed into support for the killers. A support campaign for Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who shot 18-year-old Michael Brown six times, has managed to collect over a quarter million dollars in a few days via GoFundMe, a crowdsourcing site. Several donors passed racist comments on the page while making donations, prompting GoFundMe to disable the comments as it was in violation of the site’s terms

The trial attracted a vast amount of press attention. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) opened a civil rights investigation of the shooting. President Barack Obama issued a statement expressing condolences to Brown’s family and committed the U.S. Department of Justice to conduct an investigation. “When an all-white, all-male jury acquitted Bryant and Milam of kidnapping and murder in September, the verdict shocked observers across the country and around the world. And when, mere months later, the men openly admitted to Look magazine that they had, in fact, mutilated and murdered Till, the outcry was so intense — and the reaction of Till’s devastated family so dignified — that it lit a spark that helped ignite the modern civil rights movement”. Bryant and Milam were acquitted of Till’s kidnapping and murder, but only months later, a Look magazine reporter interviewed Bryant and Milam. Protected against double jeopardy, they admitted to killing him, which further inflamed black opinion. Till’s murder is noted as a pivotal event motivating the African-American Civil Rights Movement. The shooting of Michael Brown is under investigation by a grand jury. The demographics of the jury are 68 percent white and 24 percent black.

If you don’t learn from your past you are forced doomed to repeat it.