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Posted: Wednesday, 15 July 2009 1:20PM
Mississippi museum wants Till casket
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CHICAGO (STNG) -- Emmett Till's glass-topped casket that showed evidence of his death by lynching in 1955 turned up last week in the storage shed of an Alsip cemetery embroiled in a grave reselling scheme.
Now planners of a Civil Rights museum in Philadelphia, Miss., about three hours from where the 14-year-old Chicago teen was kidnapped and killed, are asking Till's relatives to add it to their collection.
Wilmer Amina Carter, a California state assemblywoman with roots in Mississippi, would like to include it at the museum, according to her spokesman Eldred Marshall.
Cook County sheriff's investigators have shut the cemetery to the public, declaring it a crime scene. Four employees, including office manager Carolyn Towns, have been charged with dismembering a human body, accused of excavating old and neglected graves, dumping the bodies into shallow mass graves and illegally reselling the plots.
Sheriff's department workers removed the rusting casket from the shed, where it had become home to a family of possums and stored it in a guarded room at a suburban sheriff's office, according to a spokesman. It may remain there until his relatives decide what they'd like to do with it.
Till was exhumed for forensic examination and reburied in a new casket in 2005, after the Justice Department reopened his murder case. His cousins had entrusted the casket to Towns, who made plans of her own to raise money and build a memorial to him and the other prominent African Americans buried at Burr Oak.
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