The body of Emmett Till will be exhumed within the next few weeks so an autopsy can be performed, authorities said Wednesday, 50 years after the black teenager was savagely murdered in the Mississippi Delta in a case that electrified the civil rights movement.
An autopsy of Till’s remains, buried in the Chicago suburb of Alsip, Ill., was ordered by District Attorney Joyce Chiles in Greenville, Miss., who is investigating the 1955 slaying with the help of the Department of Justice and the FBI.
“The exhumation will take place in the next few weeks,” said Deborah Madden, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s office in Jackson, Miss. “Previous investigations did not perform an autopsy, even in 1955. Consequently, no cause of death was ever established.”
Authorities in Mississippi and Washington announced last year that the case would be reopened after a documentary by New York filmmaker Keith Beauchamp claimed to have uncovered new evidence about the case.
Till’s lynching Aug. 8, 1955, in segregated Money, Miss., touched off intense mourning throughout black America and helped give rise to the modern civil rights movement.
At the funeral, Mamie Till Mobley insisted on an open casket, to expose the brutality her son suffered. She died two years ago and is buried next to her son.
Till was a brash 14-year-old from Chicago who knew nothing of the Jim Crow South. While visiting family members, he whistled at a white woman in a store. Frightened relatives rushed him home, but he was later abducted, and his badly beaten body was found in the Tallahatchie River.
Roy Bryant, the husband of the woman Till whistled at, and his half brother J.W. Milam were charged with the killing but acquitted of murder.
Bryant and Milam later admitted in a Look magazine article to torturing Till. Both men are now dead.
