UPDATE: The above casket seems to have a one-piece top. In the picture below we see the more typical split top. So, maybe this isn't Till's.Authorities discover original casket of Emmett Till
Posted: 11:41 AM ET
(CNN) — Authorities discovered Emmett Till’s original casket in a dilapidated garage at a historic cemetery where four people are accused of digging up graves and reselling them, police said Friday.“There was wildlife living inside of it,” Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said of the casket, which he said was found in the corner of a garage filled with lawn care equipment and other “piles of things” at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois.
“We very quickly came to the conclusion it was the original casket that Emmett Till was buried in,” Dart said.
Till, 14, was killed in August 1955 in Mississippi after he reportedly whistled at a white woman.
His body was exhumed in 2005 as part of a renewed probe into his death. The Chicago Tribune reported that he was reburied in a different casket.
Four people face felony charges after authorities discovered that hundreds of graves were dug up and allegedly resold at the cemetery. Groundskeepers told investigators that Till’s grave was not among them, Dart said earlier this week.
On August 28, 1955 Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam, began looking for Emmett Till. They found him at his uncle's cabin. Entering the cabin with flashlights and Colt 45 pistols, they kidnapped Emmett. To teach him lesson, they drove him to a weathered shed on a plantation in neighboring Sunflower County, where they beat and then shot him. Three days later, Emmett’s corpse was pulled from the depths of the Tallahatchie River. It was weighted down by a seventy-five pound cotton gin fan, which was tied around Till’s neck with barbed wire, his right eye hanging midway to his cheek, his nose flattened, and a bullet hole through his head.
Till's mother made the decision to have an open casket funeral. She wanted the world to know what had happened to her son. Fifty-thousand people attended the funeral of Emmett Till.
[T]he photographs of Emmett taken at his open-coffin viewing ... were first published nationally in Jet magazine and shunned by mainstream news organizations but have since become iconic, textbook images of the Jim Crow era. In "Eyes on the Prize," the PBS documentary on civil rights, Charles Diggs, a former congressman from Detroit, called the Jet photographs "probably one of the greatest media products in the last 40 or 50 years, because that picture stimulated a lot of anger on the part of blacks all over the country."
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