Emmett Till’s Casket Donated to Smithsonian
The casket that once held the body of Emmett Till, the teen lynched for whistling at a White woman in Money, Miss., in 1955,  will be exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture when it opens in Washington in 2015. The then-14-year-old Emmett had been visiting relatives in Mississippi from Chicago when he was dragged from his home in the middle of the night, beaten, shot and thrown into the river. His lynching was a major catalyst for the modern Civil Rights Movement. Till’s bloated, mutilated body was exhumed from Chicago’s Burr Oak Cemetery in 2005 when the FBI investigated potential accomplices in the killing. He was reburied in a new casket, and the original was found rusting in a shed at Burr Oak recently during investigation of an alleged grave-reselling scandal, The Associated Press reports.

Stimulus Checks Sent to 3,900 Inmates
The federal government sent about 3,900 economic stimulus payments of $250 each this spring to people who were in no position to use the money to help stimulate the economy: prison inmates, The Associated Press reports. The checks were part of the massive economic recovery package approved by Congress and President Barack Obama in February. About 52 million Social Security recipients, railroad retirees and those receiving Supplemental Security Income were eligible for the one-time checks. Prison inmates are generally ineligible for federal benefits. However, 2,200 of the inmates who received checks got to keep them because, under the law, they were eligible, said Mark Lassiter, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration. They were eligible because they weren’t incarcerated in any one of the three months before the recovery package was enacted. “The law specified that any beneficiary eligible for a Social Security benefit during one of those months was eligible for the recovery payment,” Lassiter told AP. The other 1,700 checks? That was a mistake.
Checks were sent to those inmates because government records didn’t accurately show they were in prison, Lassiter said. He said most of those checks were returned by the prisons. “We are currently reviewing each of those cases to determine whether or not the recovery payment was due,” Social Security Commissioner Michael Astrue said in a statement issued Wednesday evening. “Where we determine payment was not due, we will take aggressive action to recover each of these erroneous payments.” The Boston Herald first reported that the checks were sent to inmates. The inspector general for the Social Security Administration is performing an audit to make sure no checks went to ineligible recipients, spokesman George E. Penn said. The audit, which had already been planned, will examine whether checks incorrectly went to inmates, dead people, fugitive felons or people living outside the U.S., Penn said. The $787 billion economic recovery package included $2 million for the inspector general to oversee the provisions handled by the Social Security Administration. The audit is part of those efforts, Penn said. There is no timetable for its conclusion. The federal government processed $13 billion in stimulus payments. About $425,000 was incorrectly sent to inmates.

Investigation into Grisly Cemetery Case Continues
The ghoulish discovery that hundreds of bodies at a historic African-American cemetery in Chicago were dumped in a greedy scheme to resell burial plots drew thousands of concerned and irate protestors this weekend. Many of the thousands who turned out at the Burr Oak Cemetery were hoping to find their dearly departed, and Cook County officials even exhumed the body of one grave as part of the investigation involving four former employees accused in case. In addition to getting rid of some bodies, the ex-workers also stacked more than one body in a single grave, authorities say. Cook County Sheriff’s Department officials say they have gotten more than 7,000 requests for information from those whose loved ones are buried in Burr Oaks but that they’ve only processed about 400 so far. The FBI and local officials continue the investigation today at Burr Oak Cemetery, where many iconic African Americans are buried – including Civil Rights-era lynching victim Emmett Till; musicians Willie Dixon, Dinah Washington and Otis Spann; and Negro Leagues Baseball players Jimmie Crutchfield and John Donaldson. Officials said they would try to respond to families in the next week, but Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said the investigation was hampered by a lack of maps for large sections of the cemetery. Many of those his staff had found were hand-drawn and sketchy, he said. “You might as well be talking about hieroglyphics here,” he said. “This is unheard of.”

King Billboard Stirs Controversy
A billboard in Houston identifying Dr. Martin Luther King as a Republican is an outrage and an outright lie, say community activists who want the humongous sign taken down. “The party of Tom Delay, the party of Rush Limbaugh, the party of Sean Hannity, the party of Michael Savage would not be the party of Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior!” argues Quanell X, one of those opposing the billboard. But Apostle Claver, founder of the Black conservative group known as the Raging Elephants, says this the sign “is saying conservatives are coming. And we’re going to offer solutions to the problems that this neighborhood has.” Claver notes that the slain civil rights leader’s niece, Alveeta King, has mentioned in her book that MLK was indeed a Republican. However, King’s sons say their father never would have voted Republican.  X says that no one has the right to align the man who lived and died to save all people to a certain Republican or Democratic Party!”