Posted on 06/13/2005 9:43:25 AM PDT by robowombat
June 2, 2005 BY DEBRA PICKETT Staff Reporter
Perhaps Mamie Till Mobley is still protecting her son.
Her decision, in 1955, to display her murdered son Emmett's body under glass might have kept his remains intact until the day federal investigators were finally ready to investigate his death.
Officials and family members stood by Till's grave at Burr Oak Cemetery Wednesday morning as Till's body was exhumed.
"It was a moment," said Simeon Wright, who, 50 years ago was awakened by the sound of angry men wresting Till, his cousin, from the bed they were sharing. "After you pass through the sadness, it was a moment of triumph today."
Minister tells story of Lazarus
In a brief service before the exhumation, the Rev. Keith Hayes told the biblical story in which Jesus commanded the stone be rolled away from Lazarus' days-old tomb and the man emerged alive, still wearing his death shroud.
After the prayer service, the cement vault holding Till's casket was lifted from the ground.
For Wright, the connection was plain. Just as Lazarus had been preserved, his young cousin's grave seemed to have been protected.
"We were afraid that the original vault would crumble after 50 years," Wright said, "but it was perfectly intact."
Shortly after 10:30 a.m., after investigators spent about two hours photographing the vault, checking its seals and draining water from inside, the vault was topped with a protective cover, wrapped in a blue tarp and then placed on the back of a white flatbed truck, which made its way from the Alsip cemetery to Stroger Hospital, where a CT scan was performed.
No autopsy at the time
The body, still beneath the clear cover under which it was displayed at Till's 1955 funeral, was described by sources as being remarkably well-preserved. The grotesque swelling that disfigured Till's head had apparently receded, sources said, leading one official to remark that Till's body looked better Wednesday than it did 50 years ago.
The body is to be transferred to the Cook County medical examiner's office, where the medical examiner, Edmund R. Donoghue, is to perform an autopsy.
An autopsy is standard procedure in any apparent homicide, but none was performed when Till's body was found 50 years ago. That lapse allowed lawyers for the two men charged in Till's death, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, to successfully argue that, without a formal identification of the body and cause of death, the accused could not be convicted of murder. At the time, only Till's family identified the body.
The autopsy will definitively prove Till's identity; family members have already submitted DNA samples for comparison. The examination of Till's body might provide other information to investigators.
When NAACP leader Medgar Evers was exhumed 28 years after his death, an autopsy provided evidence that convicted Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 murder. Dr. Michael Baden, the forensic pathologist who performed Evers' autopsy, said no matter the condition of Till's body, bone injuries will be apparent, as will bullet holes and evidence of drowning.
Acquitted men admitted murder
When Till's body was shipped back to Chicago, by train, in 1955, funeral director A. A. Rayner was instructed to keep it permanently sealed. Till's Mississippi relatives had been required to sign papers agreeing to this condition before officials there would release the body.
But Till's mother refused to keep the agreement, demanding that the crate be opened and the body put on public display.
Rayner said at the time that he believed the body had been packed with lime to make it deteriorate faster. He did some work to prepare the body for viewing -- removing the boy's swollen tongue, sewing closed a gaping head wound, pushing an eyeball back into its socket and injecting some patches of skin with a preservation fluid -- but did not embalm the corpse, which was displayed under an airtight case. This could be good news for investigators because embalming can make accurate lab tests impossible.
The renewed investigation into the Till case was launched in May 2004, in hopes it might lead to additional prosecutions. Though Bryant and Milam, acquitted of murder and kidnapping charges by all-white juries, are dead, recent documentaries offered evidence that others, who are still alive, were involved in the death of Till, who was said to have "sassed" storekeeper Roy Bryant's young wife in rural Money, Miss.
According to Bryant and Milam's own account, given to Look Magazine after their trials, Till's murder was neither premeditated nor a conspiracy. The two men claimed that, after taking Till from his bed, they drove him around for a while, intending to scare him. They eventually brought him to a shed beside Milam's home in Glendora, where they beat and pistol-whipped him.
To their surprise, the men said, Till was defiant.
Enraged, the two men then drove Till -- battered, according to their account, but still conscious -- to a cotton gin, where they forced him to lift a large metal fan into the back of the truck. They took him to the banks of the Tallahatchie River, told him to carry the fan to the edge of the river and then to strip naked.
Then, the two men said, Milam shot Till once in the head and the two men tied the fan around his neck to weigh down the body in the river, where it was recovered days later.
This account does not fully square with the damage visible on the recovered body. Till's head appeared to have been smashed with an ax and an ear had been cut off, as if extensive torture had occurred.
Contributing: Stefano Esposito, Natasha Korecki, Steve Patterson and Monifa Thomas
How are you going to get justice 50 years later? The admitted killers were acquitted and are probably dead. One must hope for justice in the next world...murderers roasting in hell hopefully.
Digging him up accomplishes nothing: the fact is and remains that the justice system failed Till and his family.
The only justice he and his murderers will receive is beyond the grave, not in it.
Who knows? The US Senate is preparing to "apologize" for a lynching that happened in 1916 that they had nothing to do with.
Amazing.
RE: The grotesque swelling that disfigured Till's head had apparently receded, sources said, leading one official to remark that Till's body looked better Wednesday than it did 50 years ago.
An incorruptible!
Justice may look like all those who were complicit being exposed and held accountable. Justice may look like family members of the acquited and now deceased have to either live with their own blood vibrating with guilt or finding a way to atone for what their family members did. Justice may in fact look like the whole world getting a look at what happened and the mother finally able to lay her head on her pillow at night with the knowledge that the light of God has been shone on a travesty. Her story has finally been heard.
Her story was heard 50 years ago, when hundreds of thousands filed past Emmett Till's body and saw what the murderers had done to him.
Her story was heard when every major newspaper in the country told it.
her story was heard when millions of Americans decided that something had to be done about Jim Crow once and for all, and they abolished it.
Her story was heard when I and millions of others learned about Emmett Till and what happened to him in my high school history book.
You are insulting this country when you imply that the story of Emmett Till has been been hidden or suppressed - it was trumpeted from the rooftops by good Americans throughout this land.
Digging him up will accomplish exactly nothing except to enable Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to stand next to his poor, murdered corpse and attempt to legitimize their reputations by basking in the legitimacy of his cause.
This whole dog and pony show is grotesque and I have no problem telling the truth about it.
Justice may look like all those who were complicit being exposed and held accountable. Justice may look like family members of the acquited and now deceased have to either live with their own blood vibrating with guilt or finding a way to atone for what their family members did.
Only someone who has never had to bury his or her own child would imagine this to be a 'dog and pony' show.
I will try to contain my rage as I inform you that I have had to bury my own child.
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