If history can be rewritten, then objects, no matter how sacred, can be put back into a shed, hidden in a basement, or destroyed. Seventy years on, the task remains what it was in 1955: to look unflinchingly at racism, at the brutality it inflicted on a child, and to refuse to let Emmett Till’s story be forgotten.
But if President Donald Trump and his allies get their way, the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture could one day be forced to get rid of Till’s glass-topped coffin — arguably the most important artifact of the civil rights movement.
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Till would have turned 84 this summer. But on August 28, 1955, a group of white men murdered him. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made a decision that changed history: she insisted on an open-casket funeral, revealing the truth about the men who killed her child.
“I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby,” she said.
Photographs of Till’s broken body, published in The Chicago Defender and Jet magazine, galvanized the civil rights movement. His casket, enshrined in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., still serves as a testament to Black grief and resistance.
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To see the casket, visitors to the museum descend into the lower galleries. And, after a long, heavy silence in line, one by one, they encounter the original glass-topped coffin, which had been discarded and left to rot in a cemetery shed before being recovered and restored.
With Trump and his allies escalating attacks on the NMAAHC and other institutions dedicated to Black history, Till’s coffin, the story of his death, and his mother’s boundless courage, are at risk.
The Journey to the Smithsonian
The journey of Till’s casket to the Smithsonian mirrors America’s desire to hide its horrors.
In 2005, after Till’s remains were exhumed from Burr Oak Cemetery outside Chicago for an autopsy and reburial, the original casket was to be preserved.
“State law prohibited us from placing that casket back into the grave, so we had to bury him in a new casket,” Till’s cousin Simeon Wright, who was with Till on the night of the murder, told Smithsonian Magazine in 2009. “We set this casket aside to preserve it because the cemetery was planning on making a memorial for Emmett and his mother. They was going to move his mother and have the casket on display.
“But you see what happened,” he said. “Someone took the money and discarded the casket in the shed.”
Indeed, the casket was found in a rusting storage shed, surrounded by garbage and decaying materials. The discovery came not through a preservation effort but during a police investigation into cemetery fraud.
The Smithsonian then claimed it for posterity.
“We are both honored and humbled that the Till family has entrusted this sacred object to the museum for preservation and safekeeping,” Smithsonian secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III said in 2009.
Conservators restored the coffin and installed it in the museum’s Civil Rights Gallery, where it now stands as one of the most haunting artifacts in the United States. For many visitors — myself included — the encounter is overwhelming.
I remember sobbing while paying homage to Till, a boy from my hometown, whose life was so horrifically snatched away — and who I’d known about since I was a child.
“Some people would say this is just a wooden box, scuffed up on the outside and stained on the inside,” Wright, Till’s cousin, said at the time. “But this very particular box tells a story, lots of stories. And by sending it to the Smithsonian’s African American museum, we — Emmett’s few remaining relatives — are doing what we can to make sure those stories get told long after we’re gone.”
Erasing History
After a group of white men seized Till from his uncle’s rural Mississippi home, they stripped him naked, then brutally beat and maimed him before shooting him in the head.
To hide their crime, the men used barbed wire to bind the 14-year-old’s lifeless body to a 75-pound cotton gin before throwing it into the Tallahatchie River.
Till’s alleged offense: whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant — a transgression that, in the Jim Crow South, was punishable by death. Roy Bryant and John Milam, the men who murdered Till, were never held accountable.
To erase Till’s story means erasing why the Civil Rights Act was necessary, why Black lives still matter, and why telling the truth about racism is the foundation of justice itself.
Yet in 2025, erasure is a reliable tool of white supremacy.
In March, Trump signed an executive order demanding an internal review of Smithsonian exhibitions, including the NMAAHC. The White House framed it as a means “to assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”
In a rant on social media earlier this month, Trump complained about how the Smithsonian is “where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”
If NMAAHC can be pressured to minimize or omit slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow, nothing can prevent the sidelining of Till’s casket, reducing his mother’s act of courage to a footnote — and removing Emmett Till’s story altogether.
This struggle is not confined to the Smithsonian, or to museums. Across the country, state legislatures have restricted how teachers can discuss racism, slavery, and civil rights in schools. Textbooks have been rewritten to reframe slavery as beneficial to Black people.
A Commemorative Train Ride
The anniversary of Till’s murder saw Smithsonian secretary Bunch having lunch with Trump and the official overseeing the museum review.
Earlier in the day, however, a commemorative train ride from Chicago arrived in Mississippi. Organized by the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi, and the National Parks Conservation Association, the trip retraced the journey Till made with his cousin, the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., that fateful summer seven decades ago.
Parker, now 85 and the last surviving eyewitness to Till’s kidnapping, rode the train with his wife, Marvel, and others whose families bore witness to that terrible summer.
“There’s a saying in the Bible, ‘Less thou forget,'” Parker said. ‘It helps us to remember.”
Emmett Till deserved to grow old. The least America can do is remember.