The weapon used to kill Black teenager Emmett Till in one of the most notorious lynchings that helped ignite the civil rights movement is now on display at a museum in the Deep South.

Emmett was just 14 when he was kidnapped from his great-uncle’s house by two White men who later admitted to beating and torturing the teen before shooting him in the head and throwing his body into the Tallahatchie River, weighed down by a 75-pound cotton gin fan.

The .45-caliber pistol and worn saddle-brown holster, marked with the initials J.M., are part of an exhibit at the state’s Two Mississippi Museums – the interconnected Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum – that aims to tell “the whole story” 70 years after Emmett’s murder.

Emmett’s murder in the Jim Crow South

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