Say Anything Blog

Exclusive: Emmett Till’s casket left to waste at Burr Oak

Cemetery debacle grows worse with discovery of coffin of civil rights icon

Broken. Rusted. Battered. The image of a glass-covered casket with the body of Emmett Till was shown around the world in the 1950s. But on Thursday, as hundreds of African Americans searched frantically for the graves of love ones, the battered casket of Till was rusting in the back of a shack at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip.

The casket was surrounded by garbage and discarded headstones strewn about like litter.

...Till, 14, was kidnapped and murdered after he whistled at a white woman in 1955 in Mississippi. The lynching of the Chicago youth helped spark the civil rights movement. A picture of his severely mutilated face was shown around the world.

His original casket is symbolic of the condition of the battered condition of the cemetery.

If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime
that’s so unjust,
Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is
filled with dust.