The body was exhumed for an autopsy in during another criminal investigation into his murder, and Till was reburied in another coffin. The glass-topped coffin was found in poor condition in a storage shed on the cemetery grounds during a police search last month, following the arrest of cemetery employees accused of digging up more than graves and reselling the plots.
Bunch III, director of the museum. It is our duty to ensure that this iconic artifact is preserved so that we will never forget. But this very particular box tells a story, lots of stories. The casket will be transported by truck, and its condition will be assessed by conservation staff at a facility in suburban Maryland, where it will be housed. News Briefing A brief news conference will be held at a.
In midcentury Chicago, death was just as segregated as life. Burr Oak Cemetery was founded in in Alsip, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, financed by prominent south-side businessmen as a final resting place for African-Americans.
Two hundred people gathered at the gravesite for one last round of tears and prayer and remembrance. As the decades passed, Mamie Till-Mobley was increasingly dissatisfied with the conditions and upkeep of the grounds. Till's gravesite was often flooded, the headstone was broken by mowers, the picture was in tatters, and the vase designed to hold flowers would no longer stand upright. She longed to move the body to the beautiful Oak Woods Cemetery and established a fundraising campaign to make it happen.
In , however, Burr Oak Cemetery came under new management. It never came to pass. While this may seem obvious, it is important to remember that there was a dispute over the identity of the body that, in , provided the jury the legal cover with which to acquit the murderers. Although Sheriff H. This was willed ignorance, designed to provide a legal mechanism to let the murderers walk free. And when they saw what happened, this motivated a lot of people that were standing, what we call "on the fence," against racism.
It encouraged them to get in the fight and do something about it. That's why many say that that was the beginning of the civil rights era. From experience, you can add, what they mean by that is we was always as a people, African Americans, was fighting for our civil rights, but now we had the whole nation behind us.
We had whites, we had Jews, Italians, Irishmen jumping in the fight, saying that racism was wrong. How did the casket become available? In , we had to exhume Emmett's body. The State of Mississippi would not reopen the case unless we could prove that the body buried at the cemetery was Emmett's. State law prohibited us from placing that casket back into the grave, so we had to bury him in a new casket.
We set this casket aside to preserve it because the cemetery was planning on making a memorial for Emmett and his mother. They was going to move his mother and have the casket on display. But you see what happened, someone took the money and discarded the casket in the shed. How did you find out about the casket? A radio personality called me about six in the morning asking me questions about it. They were on top of what was going on at the cemetery. I told him what was supposed to happen to the casket.
He kept asking me questions and I said "Wait a minute, let me go out there and check and see. I don't know what's going on. Let me go out to cemetery and get some answers, find out what's going on out there. The last time my cousin saw the casket it was inside of the building, preserved. We don't know who moved it out into the shed but I got a chance to see it, it was just horrible the way they had discarded it like that without even notifying us.
They could have called the family, but they didn't. Why did you decide to donate the casket to the Smithsonian? Donating it to the Smithsonian was beyond our wildest dreams. We had no idea that it would go that high. We wanted to preserve it, we wanted to donate it to a civil rights museum. Smithsonian, I mean that's the top of the line. It didn't even cross our mind that it would go there, but when they expressed interested an in it, we was overjoyed.
I mean, people are going to come from all over the world. And they're going to view this casket, and they're going to ask questions.
What he did in Mississippi and how it cost him his life. And how a racist jury knew that these men were guilty, but then they go free. They'll get a chance to hear the story, then they'll be able to They will go out and do their best to help the little guys that can't help themselves.
Because in Mississippi, in , we had no one to help us, not even the law enforcement. No one to help us. I hope that this will inspire our younger generation to be helpers to one another. What feelings do you experience when you see the casket today? I see something that held the object of a mother's unconditional love. And then I see a love that was interrupted and shattered by racial hatred without a cause.
It brings back memories that some would like to forget, but to forget is to deny life itself. For as you grow older, you are going to find out life is laced with memories. You're going to talk about the good old days.
When you get 50, you're going to talk about your teenage days. You're going to listen to music from the teenage days. You don't have to believe me, just trust me on that. I'm not talking about what I read in a book.
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