Money. Rural Mississippi, 1954. A whistle. Then a murder. This, however, was not a murder over money, but rather in Money, a tiny one-shop town, whose primary inhabitants were sharecroppers, a throwback to antebellum times. That general store was owned by the Bryant family, whose owners included twenty-one year old Carolyn Bryant, a former beauty queen whose good looks were well-known around those parts.
It was that fateful day, when a fourteen year old boy from Chicago named Emmett Till came down to spend a few weeks visiting with relatives. He stayed along with several of his cousins at his great-uncle Mose "Preacher" Wright's home, in a nearby section of town exclusively populated by blacks. Unbeknownst to young Emmett, there was an unwritten "code" in rural Mississippi: it was well known in the Jim Crow South that there were certain things a black male - be it a young child, or an adult man - just did not do. The list was long, and extensive. His mother, Mamie Till Bradley, warned him before he boarded the train from Illinois that such "black codes" still existed. In fact, she feared a great deal for her son's safety, and was reticent to even allow him to Mississippi.
Nonetheless, the young Till was insistent, and as was unsurprising to those who knew him, he exuded a confidence in adolescence that made him fearless. However, street smarts in Chicago would only get a young black man so far in rural Money. Though 700 miles apart geographically, the two locales were more like a million miles apart sociologically, racially, and culturally.
There were unspoken rules Emmett would need to acquaint himself with that were prevalent throughout the South at this time, and most black men were acquiescent, if not downright submissive to the white race's presupposed dominance
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