Three days later he was abducted from his uncle’s house, taken away and beaten so badly he was unrecognisable.

His body was later recovered from the river.

Mrs Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother J W Milam, were later acquitted of the murder by an all-white jury.

Both men are now dead but it is commonly accepted they committed the murder, along with others.

The Emmett Till case was one of the sparks which lit the touch paper among black civil rights activists and their white sympathisers.

By the mid-1960s, the whites were losing their grip and white supremacists, including the Ku Klux Klan, were becoming increasingly desperate and vicious.

Edgar Ray Killen pictured with his wife Betty Jo

In September 1963 four little black girls were killed when Klansmen bombed a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama.

The following summer three civil rights activists - James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman - were on their way to investigate a church firebombing in Mississippi.

The trio were arrested by Cecil Price, a deputy sheriff for Neshoba County, who called Edgar Ray Killen and other local Klansmen and arranged for them to be ambushed on a road outside , Mississippi.

All three were shot dead and buried under a dam.

Price and several others were convicted of conspiracy charges in 1967 but were freed after a few years in jail.

‘End of an era’

But Killen, one of the ringleaders, has finally been convicted of murder and jailed for 60 years.

“We are coming to the end of an era, there’s not many more of these cases left,” says Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Legal Center’s Intelligence Report.

The three civil rights activists were ambushed by a gang of whites

He said of the Emmett Till case: “It really galvanised black America. His mother decided on an open casket funeral and Jet magazine photographed his face, which was horribly disfigured.

“It galvanised blacks outside of the South, many of whom were out of touch with what was going on.”

Mr Potok told the BBC News Website: “The South has changed radically since then and prosecutors are very willing, and indeed anxious, to bring these cases.”

He said most people - both black and white - support the idea of bringing these cases but he added: “To some extent you can imagine that, if you live in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and that is all you know, you do not really want this sort of negative publicity.”

‘It’s a new day’

Jim Prince, editor of the Neshoba Democrat newspaper in Mississippi, agrees: “It’s a new day in the South. Younger generations don’t have the baggage of ‘64 or the fear.

“Fear was a big factor. The Klan ruled with an iron hand, they were thugs.”

It’s not going to change overnight and sadly people all over the world still make decisions based on the colour of people’s skins John White NAACP

John White, communications director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), welcomed Killen’s conviction: “We’re glad to see justice come, even though it’s come late.”

But he said they were saddened that two Senate representatives, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, were among a dozen senators who had not signed the anti-lynching legislation.

Mr White said: “The South is completely different to what it was 40 years ago and a lot of black families have moved back there because of the way it’s changed.

“But there is still a lot of work to be done.

“For example, a lot of desegregated schools have become all-black because white parents have put their children into private schools.”

But, he said: “It’s not going to change overnight and sadly people all over the world still make decisions based on the colour of people’s skins.”

Original article