The Business of Us All.

Emmett Till in 1952, three years before he was brutally murdered:

"Two months ago I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the Negroes in the South I said, `That's their business, not mine.' Now I know how wrong. I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all." -- Mamie Bradley, mother of Emmett Till

Mamie Bradley, mother of Emmett Till (pictured above) - the 14-year-old black Chicago boy visiting Mississippi in 1955, who was kidnapped from his uncle's home in the town of Money and killed after he whistled at a white woman - insisted on leaving her murdered son's casket open for the funeral. Emmett was beaten so badly that his brain had to be removed prior to his burial...so badly that his mother only recognized the mutilated corpse of her son by the shape of his ears. She was quoted as saying, "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.”

"The Hurricane Katrina disaster, like the Emmett Till affair, revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation's citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see but had spent the better part of the past two decades demonizing." -- Henry Giroux, author of Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability.

Emmett Till's casket donated to the Smithsonian

Plans are in the works to exhibit the casket that once held the body of lynching victim Emmett Till at the Smithsonian Institution's ...

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