Louis Till Louis Till ( 1922 - July 2 , 1945 ) was an American soldier and convicted rapist and murderer . He is best known as the father of Emmett Louis Till , whose murder in 1955 at the age of fourteen galvanized the African - American civil rights movement . A soldier during World War II , Louis Till was executed by the U . S . Army in 1945 after being found guilty of murder and rape . The circumstances of his death were little known even to his family until they were revealed after the trial of his son ' s murderers ten years later , which affected subsequent discourse on the death of Emmett Till . Life . Louis Till grew up an orphan in New Madrid , Missouri . As a young man , Till worked at the Argo Corn Company , was an amateur boxer , and was very popular with women . At the age of 17 , he began courting Mamie Carthan , a woman of the same age . Her parents disapproved , thinking the charismatic Till was " too sophisticated " for their daughter . At her mother ' s insistence , Mamie broke off their courtship . But the persistent Till won out , and they married on October 14 , 1940 . Both were 18 years old . Their only child , Emmett Louis Till , was born on July 25 , 1941 . Mamie left her husband soon after learning that he had been unfaithful . Louis , enraged , choked her to unconsciousness , to which she responded by throwing scalding water at him . Eventually she obtained a restraining order against him . After violating this repeatedly , a judge forced Till to choose between enlistment in the United States Army or imprisonment time . Choosing the former , he enlisted in 1943 . While serving in the Italian Campaign , Till was arrested by military police , who suspected him of the murder of an Italian woman and the rape of two others in Civitavecchia . After a lengthy investigation he was court martialed , found guilty , and sentenced to death by hanging . The sentence was carried out at the United States Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa on July 2 , 1945 . He was a fellow prisoner of American poet Ezra Pound , who had been imprisoned for collaborating with the Nazis and Italian Fascists ; he is mentioned in lines 171 - 173 of Canto 74 of Pound ' s " Pisan Cantos " : Till was buried in Grave 73 , Row 7 of Plot E in Oise - Aisne American Cemetery . Aftermath . The circumstances of Till ' s death were not revealed to his estranged wife . Mamie Till would later say that she was only told her husband ' s death was due to " willful misconduct " , and noted that bureaucracy had frustrated her attempts to learn anything more . The details of Louis Till ' s execution only fully emerged ten years later , after the murder of his son and subsequent trial . On August 28 , 1955 , fourteen - year old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi , after reportedly flirting with a white woman . The woman ' s husband and brother - in - law abducted Till and tortured him to death , and then threw his body into the river . The men were arrested , charged and tried with first degree murder , but were acquitted by an all - white jury . After the trial , which received much attention from the national media , Mississippi senators James Eastland and John C . Stennis uncovered details about Louis Till ' s crimes and execution and released them to reporters . The Southern media immediately leaped upon the story : various editorials claimed that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ) and the Northern media had covered up or lied about the truth of Emmett Till ' s father . Many of these editorials specifically attacked a short piece that had appeared in " Life " magazine , which presented Louis Till as having died fighting for his country in France . This article was in fact the only published piece that ever lionized the elder Till , and " Life " quickly published a retraction . For white Southerners , however , the impression was left that the erroneous " Life " article was representative of the Northern media in general . Subsequently , other editorials went so far as to tar Emmett Till with his father ' s crimes . These editorials essentially portrayed Emmett as a burgeoning rapist after the fashion of his father , thereby justifying his murder .