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".
Lynching of Alfred Blount On February 9, 1893, Alfred Blount, an African American and a Chattanooga native, was taken from his jail cell in the county jail and brutally beaten, stabbed, and hung from the Walnut Street Bridge in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Blount was charged with assault of a woman by the name of Mrs. M. A. Moore. Moore, 51 and widowed, claimed she was cleaning her house when a man entered through her back door requesting food. Moore, assuming it was a neighbor of hers, invited the man in and called out to her African American house boy Sam to bring the man some food. Upon realizing Sam's absence, Moore herself went into the kitchen to prepare food before reporting being grabbed by the arm and attacked by the man. After hitting the man with her left hand, Moore fainted and laid unconscious in her house before recalling the incident to her neighbor, Mrs. DeRochement.