Emmett Till’s funeral began shortly after his body came home to Chicago. The A. A. Rayner Funeral home opened its doors for the initial viewing on Friday, September 2. On Sunday, Till's body was moved to the Robert’s Temple of the Church of God in Christ for a deeply emotional service. The church remained open for two days as a steady stream of people came to pay their last respects—one hundred thousand of them, according to the police estimate. After final prayers on Tuesday morning, fifty cars followed Emmett’s hearse to the burial ground at Burr Oak Cemetery.

In midcentury Chicago, death was just as segregated as life. Burr Oak Cemetery was founded in 1927 in Alsip, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, financed by prominent south-side businessmen as a final resting place for African-Americans. Famous contemporaries of Emmett Till were buried there including heavyweight boxing champion Ezzard Charles, songwriter/producer Willie Dixon, gospel singer Roberta Martin, and Dinah Washington, “the queen of the blues.”

It was warm even for early September when Emmett Till’s body was laid to rest in Burr Oak. Two hundred people gathered at the gravesite for one last round of tears and prayer and remembrance. His ground level marker read simply, “Emmett Till, In Loving Memory” along with the dates of his birth and death, and a tiny photo of him from Christmas, 1954. As the decades passed, Mamie Till-Mobley was increasingly dissatisfied with the conditions and upkeep of the grounds. Till's gravesite was often flooded, the headstone was broken by mowers, the picture was in tatters, and the vase designed to hold flowers would no longer stand upright. She longed to move the body to the beautiful Oak Woods Cemetery and established a fundraising campaign to make it happen.

In 2001, however, Burr Oak Cemetery came under new management. Under the direction of Carolyn Towns, the cemetery satisfied Till-Mobley with a promise to build a museum called the “Emmett Till Historical Museum.” The museum would honor the legacy of Emmett and provide a final resting spot for him, Till-Mobley, and her long-time husband Gene Mobley. It never came to pass.

In May 2004, nearly fifty years after his burial, the FBI reopened the Till case. The Cook County Medical Examiner set up a tent at Burr Oak Cemetery and exhumed Till’s body. The forensic exam determined that the body in Burr Oak Cemetery was in fact the body of Emmett Till. While this may seem obvious, it is important to remember that there was a dispute over the identity of the body that, in 1955, provided the jury the legal cover with which to acquit the murderers. Although Sheriff H. C. Strider indicated that Till was “colored” on the death certificate, he testified in trial that the body was so decomposed that he could not identify its race. This was willed ignorance, designed to provide a legal mechanism to let the murderers walk free. With this background, the 2005 exhumation takes on new importance. The forensic exam marked the end of Strider’s racist lie.

Three days after the FBI exhumed the body, they set the body in a new coffin and, in a private ceremony, reinterred the body. Because the long-promised Emmett Till Historical Museum had not yet come to pass, the family understood the reburial as a temporary measure. When the museum was complete, they believed Till’s body would be moved once more.

In July 2009, Carolyn Towns was charged with dismembering remains, reselling occupied plots, and stealing over $100,000 from the cemetery. She pled guilty to a range of charges in 2011 and began a twelve-year prison sentence in November of that year.

Although Till’s plot was not harmed by Town’s scheme, she had not cared for Till’s casket. Following the exhumation, the original casket sat in a neglected storage shed and was occupied by a family of possums. When it was discovered in 2009, the Till family took possession of the casket, had it restored at A. A. Rayner and Sons funeral home, and made plans to give it to Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Beautifully refurbished, that original coffin where Emmett’s body lay while one-hundred-thousand mourners passed by, where the famous photograph of his brutalized face was taken, where he rested for fifty years, now forms the centerpiece of the most moving display in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D. C. With the coffin front and center, the visitor enters a room designed to look like the Roberts Temple did in September 1955.

While the original coffin has moved to Washington, D. C., Till remains in Burr Oak Cemetery, where he was first buried in 1955. The headstone is small and relatively unadorned, the museum remains unbuilt, but the gravesite is peaceful and open to public viewing.

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Hours after Till’s body was discovered protruding from the Tallahatchie River, Mississippi authorities began to bury the body—and the story—in a rural cemetery at a rural church deep in the Mississippi Delta. Had Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley not intervened and reclaimed her son’s body, Till’s lynching may have been recorded in the history books alongside the likes of George Lee and Lamar Smith. Like Till, Lee and Smith were lynched in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. Unlike Till, their stories have been largely forgotten. The difference in their respective fates can be traced to Mamie Till-Mobley's demand that the "world see" what happened to her son. It was at Robert’s Temple Church of God in Christ that the world saw. As Yvette Johnson wrote in the Song and the Silence, Mamie Till-Mobley changed the world with the open-casket funeral.

Upon arriving back in Chicago on the morning of September 2, 1955, the first stop for Till’s body was the A. A. Rayner Funeral home which, in 1955, was located at the corner of 41st and Cottage Grove. The casket arrived locked, sealed with the state seal of Mississippi, and accompanied by orders that the casket was not to be opened. If Mississippi authorities could not bury the body in a nameless cotton field, they hoped their seal would keep Till’s story under wraps. It did not work.

Till-Mobley disregarded the order and insisted that the casket be opened. It was at A. A. Rayner Funeral Home that she uttered the famous phrase: “Let the world see what they did to my boy.” Following Mamie's wishes, Rayner placed the body in the front room of their facility in a glass-topped casket. Over the next two days, as many as fifty thousand people would visit the funeral home to pay their respects.

Among the throngs at the funeral home was the photographer David Jackson. Jackson was a photographer for Johnson Publications, and Till-Mobley allowed him to be on the podium at the twelfth street station when Till’s body arrived. He then accompanied the body to Rayner and, when Till-Mobley opened the casket, he took a picture and published it in Johnson Publication’s leading outlets: Jet and the Chicago Defender. In a way that words could never do, Jackson’s photograph captured the sheer violence visited on the body—and especially the face—of Emmett Till. Although the brutality of the picture is difficult to describe, the words of John Edgar Wideman come close. He described a face “crushed, chewed, [and] mutilated.” A face “with all the boy, all the human being battered out of it.” Jackson’s photograph transformed the Till murder from one more 1955 Mississippi lynching into the unforgettable spark of the civil rights movement. Delta activist Amzie Moore may have put it best, claiming that the photograph made Till’s murder “the best advertised lynching I had ever heard.”

For black Chicago, however, the Jackson photograph was only the beginning. On Sunday, September 4th, the body was moved to the Robert’s Temple Church of God in Christ—the home congregation of Mamie Till and her mother Alma. The two-thousand seat auditorium was filled to capacity for the funeral, and several thousand more listened to the 90-minute service on loudspeakers set up outside the church. The sermon was given by Bishop Louis Ford, who used the funeral to call on President Eisenhower to “go into the Southern states and tell the people there . . . that unless the Negro gets full freedom in America, it is impossible for us to be leaders in the rest of the world.” He closed the sermon by announcing that the burial would be delayed until Tuesday and the body would lay in state for the next two days.

The following 48 hours saw an estimated one-hundred thousand mourners file past the body.

In 1991, Robert’s Temple Church of God in Christ underwent a major renovation. The iconic cross-shaped marquis was removed, a tan brick facade was installed over the top of the original storefront, an angular roofline hid the original curved profile, a drop-ceiling was installed, and the balcony was removed.

On March 29, 2006, Robert’s Temple was designated as a Chicago Landmark. The small plaque on the west side of the building is the only visible acknowledgement of the church’s key role in the Till story.

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