The shameful, sadistic murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, a black youth who whistled at a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store in 1955, was a powerful catalyst for the civil rights movement. Till's killers were apprehended, but quickly acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury, later providing grisly details of the murder in a story to journalists. Three months after Till's body was found, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.