Lynching victim Till's casket to go to Smithsonian

[August 28, 2009]  CHICAGO (AP) -- Emmett Till's family is donating the civil rights-era lynching victim's original casket to the Smithsonian Institution.

A news conference is planned Friday at the same Chicago church where the teen's brutalized remains were displayed in the glass-topped casket in 1955. He was killed in Mississippi after whistling at a white woman.

Till's casket will be at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., when it opens in 2015.

The tattered casket was found last month in a shed at the suburban Chicago cemetery where former workers are suspected of unearthing corpses and reselling plots.

Till's remains weren't disturbed. But after his body was exhumed in 2005 and reburied in a new casket, the original casket was simply discarded.

[Associated Press]

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