As Grace Falgoust approached the courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi on the morning of September 20, 1955, she felt the weight of hostile stares. On the surface, little distinguished the plainly dressed Falgoust from the hundreds of other white people who had come to observe the trial of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the men accused of brutally lynching Emmett Till.

However, since her arrival in Sumner the previous day, Falgoust had been passing out leaflets that described the defendants as “depraved.” To make matters worse, some locals spotted Falgoust and her interracial delegation from the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) sharing a picnic lunch together. Word quickly spread that the union activists were “race-mixers.” “Evidently our ‘sin’ of integration was far greater in the minds of these people than the gruesome murder of a Negro child,” Falgoust remarked.

The haunting image of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till’s mangled face is seared into our collective memory, a tragic epitome of the brutal violence that helped maintain white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. But Emmett’s murder on August 28, 1955 in rural Mississippi was more than just a tragedy: it also inspired a wave of determined protest across the United States, which galvanized many labor activists. In fact, the largest rallies condemning the murder and sham trial were sponsored by labor unions. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Bradley, thought “the unions were just fantastic.”