The original casket for Chicagoan Emmett Till was moved Tuesday from Burr Oak Cemetery to a South Side funeral home for restoration and storage.
The original casket for Chicagoan Emmett Till was moved Tuesday from Burr Oak Cemetery to a South Side funeral home for restoration and storage. A.A. Rayner & Sons Modern Funeral Service, 318 E. 71st St., is where the casket will be stored until Till’s family decides which museum it will be donated to. Till’s family chose the Black-owned funeral home, in part, because it provided the casket for the murdered teen’s 1955 funeral as well as the new casket he is now buried in, after being exhumed in 2004. “The sheriff’s office brought the casket to us late (Tuesday),” said Charles Childs, a co-owner of A.A. Rayner & Sons. “The family has not seen the casket yet but will sometime next week.” In the wake of the Burr Oak Cemetery scandal, Cook County sheriff’s police discovered the dilapidated casket in a wood shed filled with possums. Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, are buried at the south suburban cemetery. “Basically, the casket had been neglected when it was supposed to have been properly preserved,” said Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart. Four former Burr Oak employees are charged with dismembering a human body and suspected of disturbing thousands of gravesites as part of a four-year plot-reselling scheme. Till’s gravesite is not believed to have been disturbed, according to Dart. Till was allegedly murdered by two white men in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. His slaying helped to spark the nation’s Civil Rights Movement. He had gone to Mississippi to visit relatives and was kidnapped and found murdered less than a week after his arrival. ______ AP Photo/M. Spencer Green Copyright 2009 Chicago Defender. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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