JACKSON, Miss. — It's been 70 years since the lynching of Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi. White men kidnapped, tortured, shot, and dumped him in a river for whistling at a white shopkeeper . His killing drew global outrage and galvanized civil rights activists.

Now the state of Mississippi is adding to its collection of artifacts from the crime — the murder weapon.

"This is a pistol that we believe is the weapon that was used to kill Emmett Till," says Nan Prince, director of collections for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. She's in a basement conservation lab, with the gun and its leather holster carefully laid out on a rolling cart.

"It's a hard item to see," she says. "I've been in this field for a long time,

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