YOUNGSTOWN — The Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past organization, in conjunction with the Mahoning Valley Historical Society, is having two distinguished guests share their perspectives and insights regarding the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.

A program to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Till’s lynching Aug. 28, 1955, in Money, Mississippi, is set for 7 p.m. Aug. 26 at the Tyler History Center, 325 W. Federal St., downtown.

Sharing their knowledge on the torture and killing of Till, which many historians and others say galvanized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, will be Dale Killinger, a retired FBI agent who reopened the case, and Keith A. Beauchamp, an award-winning filmmaker who has conducted extensive research on the Till killing and co-produced the movie “Till” with Whoopi Goldberg.

Till, who had taken a train to Mississippi from his Chicago home to visit relatives, was kidnapped, then tortured and killed in a barn on the Shurdan Plantation after having stopped at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market a few days earlier with his cousins, where he wolf-whistled at Carolyn Bryant, who co-owned the business in the tiny Delta town. Around 2 a.m. a few days later, Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, kidnapped Till from his uncle Mose Wright’s home before torturing and killing the teen.

A short time later, 14-year-old Robert Hodges, who was fishing in the Tallahatchie River, discovered the mutilated remains of Till, who had been shot and weighed down with a 75-pound cotton gin tied to his neck.

Bryant and Milam were charged with murder and kidnapping, but an all-white, all-male jury took only 67 minutes to deliberate before acquitting the two men on all charges. To this day, no one has been held legally accountable for the killing.

Killinger led the 2004 reinvestigation into the crime, which included exhuming the remains of Till, who is buried in a Cook County, Illinois, cemetery. An autopsy and DNA results proved conclusively that the body, which had been well preserved for decades, was that of Till, despite unsubstantiated and persistent rumors that it had been someone else.

Killinger’s investigation also turned up previously unidentified witnesses to whom he spoke, along with a missing trial transcript.

“You can go back in time and find witnesses and evidence, just like we did,” Killinger said during a lecture he gave in 2024 at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Beauchamp, who studied criminal justice at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, first learned about the Till case when he was 10 and had been exposed to racism himself. In 1997, he moved to New York City to pursue his dream of becoming a filmmaker, fueled by a desire to fight racism.

While working at a film company that a few childhood friends had founded, Beauchamp spent many evenings researching the murder of Till and its aftermath — something that had deeply affected the filmmaker when he saw Till’s mutilated remains in an issue of Jet magazine.

That story also carried a local connection, Penny Wells, executive director of Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past, noted.

“Simeon Booker, a reporter from Youngstown, covered the story for Jet magazine and was instrumental in sharing the murder of Emmett with the country and the world,” Wells said in an email.