When the Public Viewing of a Mutilated Body is a Statement: The Funeral of Emmett Till
Perhaps the greatest value that the embalmer gives to society is the ability to restore disfigured bodies. There’s a limit to what we’re able to restore, but for many cases we can allow families to see their deceased loved one in a restored (or semi-restored) state.
Sometimes, though, the viewing of a mutilated body is a statement.
Via Wikipedia:
Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African-American teenager who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was from Chicago, Illinois, visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region, when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Several nights later, Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went to Till’s great-uncle’s house. They took Till away to a barn, where they beat him and gouged out one of his eyes, before shooting him through the head and disposing of his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighting it with a 70-pound (32 kg) cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Three days later, Till’s body was discovered and retrieved from the river.
Till’s body was returned to Chicago. His mother, who had raised him mostly by herself, insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket to show the world the brutality of the killing. “The open-coffin funeral held by Mamie Till Bradley exposed the world to more than her son Emmett Till’s bloated, mutilated body. Her decision focused attention not only on American racism and the barbarism of lynching but also on the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy”
The murderers were later acquitted of their actions by an all white jury. A couple months after their acquittal, they confessed the crime and sold their story to Look Magazine for $4,000.
Concerning the public viewing (which reportedly drew more than 100,000 viewers), Emmett’s mother stated, “let the world see what has happened, because there is no way I could describe this. And I needed somebody to help me tell what it was like.”
