Black history
you didn’t
learn in school
August 28, 2015
Mamie Till Mobley
by Justin Giuliano
Mamie Till Mobley, the mother of Emmet Till, was an instrumental voice in the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. Emmet Till, the 14 year old boy whose death at the hands of southern racists in 1955 was one of the sparks for the early civil-rights movement.
Mamie Till grew up in Alabama & then later Chicago. She was an excellent student – Mamie was the first black student to make the A Honor roll & the fourth black student to graduate from the predominately white Argo Community High School. She met her husband, Louis Till, at age 18 & married him later that year. Nine months later, Emmett Till or “Bobo” as he was nicknamed, was born at Cook County Hospital in Chicago.
Emmett would never know his father, who was shipped out to Europe as an Army private. Mamie & Louis Till separated in 1942. Three years later, Mamie received a letter from the Department of Defense informing her, without a full explanation, that Till was killed in Italy due to “willful misconduct.”
By the early 1950s, Mamie & Emmett had moved to Chicago’s South Side.
In 1955 Mamie decided to take a long-awaited vacation to Nebraska to visit relatives. She wanted her son to go with her but Emmett was set on joining his cousins & spending the end of the summer in Mississippi. When she put her son on a Southbound train, it was the last time she would see him alive.
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, on August 24, 1955, when he reportedly flirted with a white cashier at a grocery store. Four days later, two white men kidnapped Till at 2:30 in the morning from his house. They then beat the teenager brutally, dragged him to the bank of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, tied him with barbed wire to a large metal fan & shoved his mutilated body into the water. Moses Wright, his relative, reported Till’s disappearance to the local authorities & three days later, his corpse was pulled out of the river. Till’s face was mutilated beyond recognition & his family only managed to positively identify him by the ring on his finger, engraved with his father’s initials.
When her boy was killed, Mamie turned to the strength of her family & faith.
“When I began to make the announcement that Emmett had been found & how he was found, the whole house began to scream & to cry. & that’s when I realized that this was a load that I was going to have to carry. I wouldn’t get any help carrying this load.”
Though his body & face were beaten beyond recognition, Mamie Till decided to have an open casket funeral so that people could realize what happened to Emmett.
“I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till.”
Some 50,000 people streamed in to view Emmett’s corpse in Chicago, with many people leaving in tears or fainting at the sight & smell of the body.
After the two white men were acquitted of murder charges by an all-white male jury, the case became an international spectacle. Mamie Till & the NAACP were hoping that at the very least, the men would be tried on kidnapping charges but the Mississippi senator ensured that Emmett Till wouldn’t receive justice.
The Mississippi senator, James O. Eastland, a staunch segregationist dug up info about Emmett Till’s father & leaked it to the press. Louis Till, Emmett’s father, was executed in 1945 for raping two Italian women & killing a third. James O. Eastland suggested that the behavior ran in the family & that Emmett was a danger to the white woman he flirted with. Mamie Till had not received word that this happened with her ex-husband & she was confused as to how the senator pulled up this information.
Despite the overwhelming odds, Mamie Till attempted to meet with President Eisenhower, though he refused. The FBI even released a statement saying that none of Emmett Till’s rights had been violated.
Rather than giving up, Mamie Till travelled the country giving speeches & waking black people up to the injustices that were present. Though she is not credited with it, she helped mobilize & start the Civil Rights Movement in many ways.
Mamie Till continued to organize & give speeches for the majority of her life. Though she passed away in early 2003, an autobiography titled Death of Innocence: The story of the hate crime that changed America was released in 2004.
“The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all.”
Sources & additional resources:
– PBS