Emmett Louis “Bobo” Till
In the summer of 1955, Mamie Till gave in to her son’s pleas to visit relatives in the South. But before putting her only son Emmett on bus in Chicago, she gave him a stern warning:
“Be careful. If you have to get down on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly.”
Emmett Louis “Bobo” Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African American boy from Chicago, Illinois, who was murdered at the age of 14 in Money, Mississippi, a small town in the state”s Delta Region after reportedly whistling at a white woman. The murder of Emmett Till was noted as one of the leading events that motivated the American Civil Rights Movement. The main suspects were acquitted, but later admitted to the murder.
Till’s mother insisted on a public funeral service, with an open casket so as to show the world the brutality of the killing: Till had been beaten and an eye gouged out, before he was shot through the head and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a 70-pound cotton gin fan tied to his body with barbed wire. His body was in the river for three days before it was discovered and retrieved by two fishermen.
Till was buried in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. The murder case was officially reopened in May 2004: as part of the investigation, the body was exhumed in order to perform an autopsy. The body was reburied in a new casket, which is standard practice in cases of body exhumation, by the family in the same location later that week. In July 2009, while his gravesite appeared undisturbed, his original casket, in which his battered body was famously displayed years earlier, was found rusting in a run-down shack on the cemetery grounds. Till’s family has since donated the original casket to the Smithsonian Institution.
