Monday, August 31, 2009
Emmett Till with his mother, Mamie Till Mobley
The Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture will feature the glass-topped casket that once displayed the remains of Emmett Till, whose murder became an early rallying point during the Civil Rights movement. Till’s family decided to donate the fifty-year-old coffin to help remind future generations of the racism and violence African Americans once endured.
“Fifty years from now someone will tell the story ... that they murdered him, threw him in the Tallahatchie River, would they believe it without the casket?” asked Simeon Wright, Till’s cousin.
Till was 14 years old when he left his home in Chicago to visit family near Money, Mississippi. Three days later, after a day of picking cotton, Till entered a store to buy bubble gum. The details of what happened next are unclear. Some say Till whistled at the 21-year-old white woman proprietor, Carolyn Bryant, asked her for a date, touched her, or upon leaving, said to her, “Bye, Baby.”
On August 28, 1955, Till was dragged from his bed at his uncle’s home and murdered. His mutilated body was discovered three days later floating in the river. Two men, Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted of the crime by an all-white male jury. However, the following year they confessed to the killing in a Look magazine article.
Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, brought her son’s body back to Chicago and insisted that, at his funeral, it be displayed in an open casket so that people could photograph it and “see what they did to my baby.” Emmett Till was buried at the Burr Oak Cemetery in Cook County, Illinois. His body was exhumed on May 31, 2005, examined by the coroner’s office and reburied in a new coffin. The original, famous coffin was stuffed into a storage shed.
-David Wallechinsky, Noel Brinkerhoff
Lynching Victim Till's Casket to Go to Smithsonian (by Don Babwin, Associated Press)
Emmett Till’s Casket Donated to the Smithsonian (by Jacqueline Trescott, Washington Post)
The Murder of Emmett Till (PBS-American Experience)
The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi (by William Bradford Huie, Look)
Comments