It's been 70 years since the lynching of Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi. White men kidnapped, tortured, shot, and dumped him in a river for whistling at a white shopkeeper. His killing drew global outrage and galvanized civil rights activists.
Now the state of Mississippi is adding to its collection of artifacts from the crime — the murder weapon.
"This is a pistol that we believe is the weapon that was used to kill Emmett Till," says Nan Prince, director of collections for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. She's in a basement conservation lab, with the gun and its leather holster carefully laid out on a rolling cart.
"It's a hard item to see," she says. "I've been in this field for a long time, and I've never had an artifact affect me quite like this…especially when you know how it was used and just the hatred that must have led to its use that night."
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