CHICAGO — When his mother put the battered body of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the ground more than 50 years ago, it was supposed to be the end of a sad saga for the boy whose lynching became a rallying point for the civil-rights movement.
But even in death, Till cannot rest. Four years after his body was exhumed as part of an investigation, and reburied in a new casket, his original glass-topped casket has been found in a rusty shed at a suburban cemetery where workers are accused of digging up and dumping hundreds of bodies in a scheme to resell the burial plots.
The casket, which was seen by mourners around the world in 1955, was surrounded by garbage and old headstones. When authorities opened it, a family of possums scampered out.
“There is no rest for Emmett,” Ollie Gordon, a cousin, said Monday. “It was turmoil when they exhumed his body, and now we are put in turmoil because we might have to exhume again.”
Till’s current grave site does not appear to be among those disturbed at Burr Oak Cemetery, the historic black burial ground south of Chicago where authorities have charged a manager and three gravediggers with the gruesome reburial scheme. The manager is also suspected of pocketing donations she elicited for a Till memorial museum, though she has not been charged in connection with those allegations.
“Emmett Till is being treated with the same disrespect in death as he was treated in life,” said Jonathan Fine, executive director of the group Preservation Chicago.
In August 1955, Till traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to visit relatives. After he whistled at a white woman outside a market, the woman’s husband and another man snatched him from his bed. His battered body was found in a river three days later, a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His nose was crushed, and his left eye was missing, as were most of his teeth.
The two men were acquitted, but the next year they confessed to the killing in a Look magazine article.
Till’s body was exhumed in 2005 as part of a new investigation into his death, as federal authorities sought to dispel long-standing rumors that the body wasn’t Till’s.
Till was reburied in another casket, as is customary after exhumations, and the original glass-topped coffin was to be saved for a memorial.
Authorities investigating the grave desecration found Till’s first casket beneath a dirty tarp in a dark corner of a cemetery shed. A sheriff’s spokesman said the casket has been moved to a secure room at a suburban sheriff’s facility. He expects it will eventually be released to the Till family.
Till’s mother chose the casket so mourners could see her son’s ghastly injuries.
Gordon, Till’s cousin, said the family has not decided whether to exhume the body again, or whether Till, his mother, stepfather and other relatives will be moved to another cemetery. She hopes his original casket can be restored and possibly placed in a museum, as had been planned.
Jerry Mitchell, a reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., whose work led to criminal convictions of some Ku Klux Klansmen, feels much the same way.
“Maybe this will lead to something good, to really do something now, really build a mausoleum, put this casket where it belongs,” he said. “There is a lot of history in that, a lot of important history.”
