"His mother had the gut and grit to say that 'I want America to see what they did to my baby's body,'" the Reverend Jesse said of Till, after the Burr Oak news broke. "More than 100,000 saw his body lying at the church. It is said that those who saw his body were never the same again."
Till hasn't rested easy in Colorado, either.
Till went missing here in Denver a decade ago, when sculptor Ed Dwight was given a million-dollar contract to create a sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr. that placed the civil rights leader on top of a three-layer pedestal bearing bronze representations of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Mahatma Gandhi and Rosa Parks. Unveiled in City Park in 2003, that piece replaced "King and Companion," a perfectly good -- if artistically vilified -- statue of MLK and Till that had stood in City Park for three decades.
After first offering the spare statue -- now described as "a beautiful sculpture that has graced the city for so many years" -- to local schools, Denver finally donated "King and Companion" to the Dr. Martin Luther King Holiday Commission and Cultural Center in Pueblo, where it was dedicated in 2002.
And still stands.