(Photos credit of emmetttillmurder.com )
Four years after Emmett Till's body was exhumed as part of an investigation, his original glass-topped casket has been found in a rusty shed at a suburban cemetery where workers are accused of digging up and dumping hundreds of bodies in a scheme to resell the burial plots.
The casket, which was seen by mourners around the world in 1955, was surrounded by garbage and old headstones. When authorities opened it, a family of possums scampered out.
"There is no rest for Emmett," Ollie Gordon, a cousin, said Monday.
"Emmett Till is being treated with the same disrespect in death as he was treated in life," said Jonathan Fine, executive director of the group Preservation Chicago.
In August 1955, Till traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to visit relatives. After he whistled at a white woman outside a market, the woman's husband and another man snatched him from his bed. His body was found in a river three days later, a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His nose was crushed, and his left eye was missing, as were most of his teeth.
The two men were acquitted, but the next year they confessed to the killing in a Look magazine article.
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