On August 24, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till reportedly flirted with a white cashier in Money, Mississippi. Four days later, two white men tortured and murdered Till. His murder galvanized the emerging Civil Rights Movement.

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Newsreel footage of President Kennedy's address to the American people after the University of Mississippi riots in 1962.

Stokely Carmichael, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, spoke to a crowd in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1964.

On December 1, 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, AL and sparked the American Civil Rights movement of the 20th century.

In 1954, Medgar Evers became the first state field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. As a civil rights leader, he fought to end the racial injustice he experienced growing up in the South.

As an NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers became a target for those who opposed racial equality and desegregation. On June 12, 1963 at 12:40 a.m., Evers was shot in the back in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

On September 29, 1962, as measures are taken to safely transport James Meredith to the University of Mississippi where he will enroll in accordance with a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding desegregation of the institution, President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy make a series of phone calls to Gov. Ross Barnett who has openly defied the Court's ruling. In one secretly recorded call that day, Attorney General Kennedy gets exasperated when the governor shoots down his idea for crowd control.