Willie Louis

Willie Louis (born Willie Reed; June 14, 1937 – July 18, 2013) was a witness to the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.

Willie Reed, as Willie Louis was then known, was born in 1937 in Greenwood, Mississippi, at the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta.

He was raised in Drew, Mississippi, by his grandparents who worked as sharecroppers.

Reed received little formal education and worked in the cotton fields.

Till was an African-American child from Chicago who was murdered in 1955 after he had reportedly whistled at a white woman in a Money, Mississippi, grocery store.

Till's murder was a watershed moment in the Civil Rights Movement.

Louis testified in court about what he had seen, but an all-white jury found the men not guilty.

Fearing for his life, Louis moved to Chicago after the trial and changed his name from Willie Reed to Willie Louis.

Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American from Chicago, was murdered in Mississippi in August 1955 for having reportedly flirted with and whistled at a 21-year-old white woman in a grocery store.

The case and subsequent trial have been called "watershed moments in the civil rights movement, galvanizing public attention on the deep perils of being black in the Jim Crow South."

On the morning of Sunday, August 28, 1955, Reed, who was 18 years old, was walking on a dirt road near Drew, Mississippi, when he saw a green-and-white Chevrolet pick-up drive past him with four white men in the front and three African-American men and an African-American youth seated with his back to the cab.

Reed recognized two of the men in the front seat as Roy Bryant, the husband of the woman at whom Till had reportedly whistled, and J.W. Milam, Bryant's half-brother.

Reed saw the truck pull into a plantation owned by Milam's brother and park in front of a barn.

As he walked closer, he heard a boy inside the barn yelling, "Mama, save me!"

and "Lord, have mercy!"

He heard the sounds of blows landing on a body and voices cursing and yelling, "Get down, you black bastard."

Reed ran to the nearby house of Amanda Bradley and told her what he had seen and heard.

Reed and another individual were sent to get water from a well near the barn.

As they did so, they heard the continuing sound of the beating until the cries became fainter and then stopped.

As Reed walked back toward the Bradley house, Milam emerged from the barn with a pistol at his side.

Milam confronted Reed and asked if he had seen or heard anything.

Reed told Milam that he had not.

Reed returned to the Bradley house and watched from a window as the men in the barn loaded what appeared to be a body into the pick-up truck.

On August 31, 1955, Till's lynched body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River.

The body showed signs that Till had been brutally beaten and shot in the head.

Reed saw a photograph of Till in the newspaper and recognized him as the youth who he had seen hunkered down in the truck.

Bryant and Milam were arrested for the murder, but Reed's grandfather warned Reed that he would be risking his safety if he spoke up.

Reed was later approached by civil rights workers who persuaded him to testify in court.

To ensure his safety, Reed went into hiding until the trial.

When Reed arrived at the courthouse to testify in the middle of September 1955, he was met by a "thicket of Klansmen massed outside the courthouse."

Reed testified at the trial.

He was shown a picture of Till and testified that it looked like the boy he had seen in the back of the truck.

He also identified Milam and testified that he had seen Milam come out of the barn to get a drink of water and then return to the barn.

In his closing argument, the prosecutor reviewed Reed's testimony and noted that if Willie had been lying, the defense would have had needed 50 lawyers to discredit him.

The prosecutor argued being unable to do that "because Willie Reed was telling the truth."

He finished by saying, "I don't know but what Willie Reed has more nerve than I have."

Despite Reed's testimony and other evidence, Bryant and Milam were found not guilty after an hour of deliberation by the all-white jury.

In the aftermath of the trial, some suggested that Reed had not been a good witness and noted that he had given inconsistent accounts as to how far he was from Milam and whether he really recognized him.

Even Till's mother later said that "Little Willie Reed" was "not a good witness."

He was interviewed in 2003 for the PBS documentary The Murder of Emmett Till and was interviewed the next year on the CBS News television program 60 Minutes.