Mattie Smith Colin, a reporter for the Chicago Defender, was dispatched to a Chicago train station in 1955 to cover the return of Emmett Till's body.

A deeply moving experience, covering what would become a flash point in the civil rights movement, Colin eloquently captured the anguish of Till's mother as her young, black son, slain in Mississippi after reportedly whistling at a white woman, was returned to her.

This is a portion of Colin's story in the Defender:

""Oh, God, Oh God, my only boy," Mrs. Mamie (Till) Bradley wailed as five men lifted a soiled paper-wrapped bundle from a brown, wooden mid-Victorian box at the Illinois Central Station in Chicago Friday and put it into a waiting hearse.

"The bundle was the bruised and bullet-ridden body of little 14-year-old Emmett L. Till of Chicago, who had been lynched down in Money, Mississippi," Colin wrote.

Colin also was at Till's funeral, where his mother insisted on an open casket to expose the horror of what had happened to her son. Images of his mutilated body were printed in the Chicago Defender and made international news.

"Mattie was a gifted and highly intelligent writer whose heart was open to the truth," said Col. Eugene F. Scott, the publisher of the Chicago Defender during the 1990s. "She had empathy and character, and could tell the kinds of stories that nobody else could."...