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?
Willie Louis Willie Louis, previously Willie Reed (June 14, 1937 – July 18, 2013) was a witness to the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till. Till was an African-American child from Chicago who was murdered in 1955 after reportedly whistling at a white woman in a Money, Mississippi grocery store. Till's murder was a watershed moment in the Civil Rights Movement. Louis testified in court about what he had seen, but an all-white jury found the men not guilty. Fearing for his life, Louis moved to Chicago after the trial and changed his name from Willie Reed to Willie Louis. He was interviewed in 2003 for the PBS documentary "The Murder of Emmett Till" and was interviewed the next year on the CBS News television program "60 Minutes".
Samuel Bowers Samuel Holloway Bowers (August 25, 1924 – November 5, 2006), Former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard, was a convicted murderer and leading white supremacist activist in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement. In response to this movement, he co-founded a reactionary organization, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Bowers committed two notorious murders of civil rights activists in southern Mississippi: The 1964 murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner near Philadelphia, for which he served six years in federal prison; and the 1966 murder of Vernon Dahmer in Hattiesburg, for which he was sentenced to life in prison 32 years after the crime. He also was accused of bombings of Jewish targets in the cities of Jackson and Meridian in 1967 and 1968 (according to the man who was convicted of some of the bombings, Thomas A. Tarrants III). He died in prison at the age of 82.