Willie Louis, previously Willie Reed, was a witness to the murder of which 14-year-old African-American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after a white woman said she was offended by him in her family's grocery store?
Emmett Till Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was a 14-year-old African-American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after a white woman said she was offended by him in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement.
Dick Rowland Dick Rowland (AKA "Diamond Dick Rowland") (born c. 1902) was an African-American teen-age shoeshiner whose arrest in May 1921 was the impetus for the Tulsa Race Riot. When he was arrested for assault, Rowland was 19 years old. The alleged victim of the assault was a white 17-year-old named Sarah Page. Page, who worked as an elevator operator, had eventually declined to prosecute.