Strong words from a strong woman. 

"I became a warrior for peace, brother and sisterhood and that I know my success in life is my refusal to spew hatred and that my challenge continues to be to eradicate a racial and religious prejudice," said Dr. Glory Van Scott, a Broadway dancer.  

Dr. Glory Van Scott reads an excerpt from her book, "GLORY: A Life Among Legends."

Her determination is the result of an infamous murder, the killing of her 14-year-old cousin Emmett Till in 1955, a case that shocked America, symbolized racist attitudes in the south and became a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

"It did not crush me. What it did, I put the pain of that way back in my mind," she said. "I pushed it away for decades."

Over that time, Van Scott focused on her career as an dancer, actress and model. 

"My actions were not of a person that was, 'I'm grieving, I'm grieving,' but rather, I will thrive and go push past this grief and become everything that you, with the deed that you did, would not have wanted me to become," she said.

She performed with several dance companies and The American Ballet Theatre, appeared on television and in four Broadway shows, and founded a youth theater company in New York.

Then, two years ago, she read that a controversial painting of Emmett's open casket would be displayed at the Whitney Museum. 

"I began to cry. The tears, they came then. They didn't come when he was first killed," Van Scott said. 

Friends encouraged her to tell her story, and so she did.

Emmett was visiting family in Mississippi from Chicago when he entered a store owned by a white couple. For reasons that remain unclear, he was kidnapped and killed a short time later, his body mutilated. Last year, the Justice Department revived its investigation of his death.

In an entry titled "For My Cousin, Emmett Till," Van Scott writes, "We were seated around our dining room table in Chicago when my mother told me of your death. I stood up from the table, looked at her and crystalized my gaze, and then turned and walked out of the room without saying a word."

"I was walking away with resolution in my mind to really make up for that. In terms of, I will be something and the person that's done this, they won't like that I became what I became, but I will use my life well," she said. 

From her struggles as a young performer to her work with artistic legends, Van Scott's book documents that life and how she did use it well.