On this day in 1955, Emmett Till’s mother had an open casket for her son

Sept. 6, 1955

Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, opened her son’s casket so that the world could “see what they did to my baby.” Some wept. Some fainted. All were moved by the sight of his brutalized body, a witness to the murderers’ monstrous deeds. 

More than 50,000 flooded the streets of Chicago outside the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, and the photograph of Till’s brutalized body appeared in publications around the world. The resulting outrage helped propel the civil rights movement. 

“It was myself in that coffin, it was my brothers in that coffin,” author James Baldwin said. “I can’t describe it so precisely, because it had been so mutilated, it had been so violated. It was him, but it was all of us.”