Emmett Till’s mother declined an offer from the mortician to “touch up” her son’s body, and she made the decision to have an open casket funeral. “I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till,” she said. Mamie's decision would make her son's death a touchstone for a generation. At a church on the South Side of Chicago, Emmett Till's mutilated body would be on display for all to see. Fifty thousand people in Chicago saw Emmett Till's corpse with their own eyes. When the magazine Jet ran photos of the body, black Americans across the country shuddered.