<P> Emmett Till, a 14 - year old African American from Chicago, visited his relatives in Money, Mississippi, for the summer . He allegedly had an interaction with a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in a small grocery store that violated the norms of Mississippi culture, and Bryant's husband Roy and his half - brother J.W. Milam brutally murdered young Emmett Till . They beat and mutilated him before shooting him in the head and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River . Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river . Mamie Till, Emmett's Mother, "brought him home to Chicago and insisted on an open casket . Tens of thousands filed past Till's remains, but it was the publication of the searing funeral image in Jet, with a stoic Mamie gazing at her murdered child's ravaged body, that forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism ." Vann R. Newkirk wrote: "The trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of white supremacy". The state of Mississippi tried two defendants, but they were speedily acquitted by an all - white jury . </P> <P> "Emmett's murder," historian Tim Tyson writes, "would never have become a watershed historical moment without Mamie finding the strength to make her private grief a public matter ." The visceral response to his mother's decision to have an open - casket funeral mobilized the black community throughout the U.S. "Young black people such as Julian Bond, Joyce Ladner and others who were born around the same time as Till were galvanized into action by the murder and trial ." They often see themselves as the "Emmett Till Generation ." One hundred days after Emmett Till's murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Alabama--indeed, Parks told Mamie Till that "the photograph of Emmett's disfigured face in the casket was set in her mind when she refused to give up her seat on the Montgomery bus ." Decades later, Bryant disclosed that she had fabricated her story in 1955 . </P> <P> On December 1, 1955, nine months after a 15 - year - old high school student, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested, Rosa Parks did the same thing . Parks soon became the symbol of the resulting Montgomery Bus Boycott and received national publicity . She was later hailed as the "mother of the civil rights movement". </P> <P> Parks was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter and had recently returned from a meeting at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee where nonviolence as a strategy was taught by Myles Horton and others . After Parks' arrest, African Americans gathered and organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott to demand a bus system in which passengers would be treated equally . The organization was led by Jo Ann Robinson, a member of the Women's Political Council who had been waiting for the opportunity to boycott the bus system . Following Rosa Park's arrest, Jo Ann Robinson mimeographed 52,500 leaflets calling for a boycott . They were distributed around the city and helped gather the attention of civil rights leaders . After the city rejected many of their suggested reforms, the NAACP, led by E.D. Nixon, pushed for full desegregation of public buses . With the support of most of Montgomery's 50,000 African Americans, the boycott lasted for 381 days, until the local ordinance segregating African Americans and whites on public buses was repealed . Ninety percent of African Americans in Montgomery partook in the boycotts, which reduced bus revenue significantly, as they comprised the majority of the riders . In November 1956, the United State Supreme Court upheld a district court ruling in the case of Browder v. Gayle and ordered Montgomery's buses desegregated, ending the boycott . </P>

What made the civil rights act an important gain