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Even in death, no rest for lynching victim Till

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-07-14 09:51

Till's mother chose the original casket so mourners could see her son's ghastly injuries. Photographs of Till's body in the coffin published in Jet Magazine became powerful images of the civil rights movement.

"The young people who later led the civil rights movement were roughly Emmett's age, (and) all of them say that was a formative moment for them, that someone their own age was being lynched for virtually nothing," said Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a three-volume biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

One person could not get the story out of her head was a young seamstress named Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks became a civil rights icon when she famously broke the law and refused to be seated at the back of a bus.

"I once asked Mrs. Parks, 'Why didn't you move to the back of the bus?"' the Rev. Jesse Jackson said last week, standing with members of Till's family at the cemetery. "She said, 'I thought about Emmett Till and I couldn't go back."'

Jackson said he was stunned by the treatment of the casket.

"I think that the thieves in this situation have no regard for history of humanity," he said.

Such talk makes the treatment of the casket that much harder to explain, Fine said.

"That casket is as much a part of the civil rights movement as the bus that Rosa Parks was riding on," he said. The bus is now on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan.

Jerry Mitchell, a reporter for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, whose work led to criminal convictions of some Ku Klux Klansmen, said Till and other civil rights-era figures tend to be overshadowed by King and a few others whose history has been better preserved.

"These things are forgotten, so they get tucked into a shack, literally," Mitchell said.

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.

Mitchell 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."

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