The Emmett Till Memorial
Casket from 1955; memorial installed 2016
Near the end of the segregation gallery there is a quiet, enclosed room where photography is not allowed and voices drop. It holds the casket in which Emmett Till, a fourteen year old boy from Chicago, was buried in nineteen fifty five after he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in Mississippi for supposedly whistling at a white woman. His mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open casket funeral so that the world could see what had been done to her son. Tens of thousands of people filed past it in Chicago, and the photographs published in Jet magazine helped ignite the civil rights movement.
The memorial is designed as a place of mourning rather than an exhibit. The casket stands in a chapel like space with soft light, and the surrounding panels tell the story with restraint: the visit to relatives in Money, Mississippi, the arrest and acquittal of the two men who later confessed, and the courage of Mamie Till Mobley in speaking out for the rest of her life. Take a moment on the bench. Many visitors describe this as the point in the museum where the history becomes personal.
The casket came to the museum in two thousand and nine. Emmett Till's body had been exhumed in two thousand and five for a federal investigation and reburied in a new casket; the original was found neglected in a cemetery shed and was rescued by his family, who gave it to the Smithsonian on the condition that it be treated with dignity. It is one of the objects that founding director Lonnie Bunch has said defined the purpose of the museum.
Did You Know? Mamie Till Mobley's decision to hold an open casket funeral led Rosa Parks to say, years later, that she was thinking of Emmett Till when she refused to give up her bus seat.
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