Ellington

CLEVELAND, Miss. (AP) — A cousin of Emmett Till is returning to Mississippi to speak about the 1955 abduction and killing of the black teenager, which helped galvanize the civil rights movement.

The Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. is speaking at 7 p.m. Monday at Delta State University.

Parker and Till traveled together from Chicago to Mississippi. Parker says he heard Till whistle at a white woman working at a rural Mississippi grocery store and later saw kidnappers take Till from a family home at night.

Till was beaten and shot, and his body was found weighted down with a cotton gin fan in the Tallahatchie River. His mother insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago so people could see the mutilated corpse.

An all-white jury in Mississippi acquitted two white men in the crime.