The barn where Emmett Till was murdered

This is the barn where lynching victim Emmett Till was murdered.

It is located at 577 Drew Ruleville Road in Drew, Mississippi.

Till was a 14-year-old African American teenager from Chicago. During the summer of 1955, he decided to visit some of his relatives in rural Mississippi.

Having grown up in Chicago, Till had little experience of the racial tensions and "unwritten rules" that existed in the Jim Crow-era South.

On August 24th, 1955, he allegedly wolf-whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white grocery store owner who operated Bryant's Grocery & Meat Market in Money, Mississippi.

Three days later, on August 27th, Carolyn's husband, Roy, learned about the alleged incident after he returned from a business trip.

Enraged that an African American teenager had whistled at his wife, he immediately began tracking down Till's whereabouts. After questioning several people, he learned that the boy was staying with relatives at the home of Mose Wright.

At some point between 2:00 and 3:30 a.m. on August 28th, 1955, Roy and his half-brother, John William "J. W." Milam, drove to Wright's house with a pistol and abducted Till under gunpoint. After putting him in the back of their pickup truck, they drove to this small barn in Sunflower County.

At the time, it was a seed shed on a plantation that was owned by Leslie Milam, who was the brother of J.W. Milam and half-brother of Roy Bryant.

It is believed that the men repeatedly beat Till in the barn before shooting him to death. Afterwards, they tied a large cotton-gin fan around his neck with barbed wire and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River.

Three days later, Till's remains were found floating in the water near Graball Landing.

Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were later found not guilty of Till's murder by an all-white jury. The brutality of the crime and their subsequent acquittal proved to be yet another spark in the emerging civil rights movement in America.

These days, the old seed barn is owned by a local dentist named Jeff Andrews. Andrews didn't learn about its tragic history until after he had purchased the property.