He and his classmates from a historically Black college in Greensboro, N.C., desegregated a Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960, inspiring similar protests across the nation.

He helped litigate a landmark school desegregation case before the U.S. Supreme Court and overturn wrongful convictions of Black defendants in North Carolina.

© Brian Gomsak for The New York Times

The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum put the gun on display Thursday, soon after the federal government released thousands of pages of records on the Till case.

© Imani Khayyam for The New York Times

President Trump’s 2017 tour of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture seems a distant memory.

© Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times