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.
William Pickens William Pickens (15 January 1881 – 6 April 1954) was an African-American orator, educator, journalist, and essayist. He wrote two autobiographies, first "The Heir of Slaves", in 1911 and second "Bursting Bonds" in 1923, in which he mentioned race- motivated attacks on African Americans. both in the urban riots of 1919 and by lynching in 1921.