On August 24, 1955, Emmett Louis Till, a fourteen-year-old black male from Chicago, Illinois, visiting relatives from Leflore County, Mississippi, entered the Bryant Grocery & Meat Market in the town of Money, Mississippi. August 28, 1955, Till was brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier. His murderers, the white woman's husband and her brother made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river. Till grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, and though he had attended a segregated elementary school, he was not prepared for the level of segregation he encountered in Mississippi. His mother warned him to take care because of his race, but Emmett enjoyed pulling pranks. On August 24, while standing with his cousins and some friends outside a country store in Money, Emmett bragged that his girlfriend back home was white. There were no witnesses in the store, but Carolyn Bryant, the woman behind the counter, claimed that he grabbed her, made passes at her, and then wolf-whistled at her as he walked out.