Tallahatchie River
| Tallahatchie River | ||
 The Mississippi Central Railroad and Mississippi Highway 7 bridges spanning the Tallahatchie River between Holly Springs and Oxford |
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| Data | ||
| location | Mississippi (USA) | |
| River system | Mississippi River | |
| Drain over | Yazoo River → Mississippi River → Gulf of Mexico | |
| confluence | two headwaters in Quitman County 34 ° 11 ′ 1 ″ N , 90 ° 12 ′ 53 ″ W |
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| Union | in Greenwood with the Yalobusha River to the Yazoo River Coordinates: 33 ° 33 '7 " N , 90 ° 10' 50" W 33 ° 33 '7 " N , 90 ° 10' 50" W
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| length | 370 km | |
| Reservoirs flowed through | Sardis Lake | |
| Navigable | over a length of 160 km | |
The Tallahatchie River belongs to the Mississippi catchment area and rises in Tippah County in the north of the US state Mississippi . The name Tallahatchie [ tæləˈhætʃɪ ] comes from the Choctaw language and means something like "rock in water".
The Tallahatchie River is 370 km long, 160 of which are navigable. At its upper course, which is sometimes also called the Little Tallahatchie River , it flows through the Sardis Lake .
The river joins the Yalobusha River to form the Yazoo River in Greenwood , Leflore County .
On August 31, 1955, the body of Emmett Till , an African-American who had been murdered for racist reasons, was discovered in the Tallahatchie River near Money . The murder of the boy and the subsequent legal appraisal, the acquittal of the murderers by an exclusively white jury, triggered large protests and is one of the triggers for the subsequent black civil rights movement in the USA.
The river became known worldwide in 1967 through the story song Ode to Billie Joe by Bobbie Gentry .