Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,117

This is the grave of Mamie Till Mobley.

Born in 1921 in Webb, Mississippi, Mamie Carthan grew up in Chicago. Her parents got out of Mississippi shortly after she was born, following the jobs and the relative lack of murderous violence north. They went to Chicago, which in fact did have murderous anti-black violence as its recent race riot had shown, but still, compared to Mississippi…. Her father got a job in the Argo Corn Products plant (I know them for corn syrup today, but I suppose that company produced a lot of products back then). I’m sure it was a hard, tough, low-paying job that was one of the worst in the plant, which was how black employment worked in the North. Still better than Mississippi.

Carthan was an excellent student, which she excelled in partly to avoid chaos at home, which led to her parents divorcing when she was 13. She went to a mostly white school and was only the 4th black girl to graduate from it, so she really was a very bright, intelligent young woman. But there wasn’t much hope for college. She met a man when she was 18. He was named Louis Till. He was a boxer, a rounder, a womanizer. Her parents were horrified. She didn’t care. She married him anyway. They had a son named Emmett. Louis’ behavior did not improve. He beat her. She divorced him. He still would come over and beat her, nearly killing her at least once. She got a restraining order. He violated it. Finally, a judge told him he could either go to prison or the Army. He chose the Army. While in Italy, he was charged and convicted of rape and murder and executed by hanging in 1945. Like a lot of American soldiers, white and black, he saw his time in Europe as a giant rape fest and he did whatever he wanted to these women. Tough stuff. Incidentally, while in prison, he got to know Ezra Pound, in prison for being a fascist scumbag, who included a reference to him in one of his poems. The Army did not tell her why her husband was executed, only that he had been. It took about 10 years for the truth to came out. By that time, she had other things on her mind.

Mamie Till married and divorced twice more in the next couple of years. She and her son were poor. She got a job with the Social Security Administration and then with the Air Force, but these were low paying jobs. Emmett didn’t exactly raise himself, but she worked very long days. So, in 1955, she sent her son to family back in Mississippi for the summer.

On August 28, 1955, Emmett Till was lynched by racist scum for talking to a white woman in a store. He was 14 years old.

It is impossible for me to imagine the level of bravery and composure it took for Mamie Till to demand her son’s brutalized body be displayed for the world to see on TV. I fully understand wanting someone else to do that–someone had to display just what lynching was for the world after all. But me? And for my son? I just can’t imagine. The world blesses her for what she did. For she changed the world. This was one of the key incidents in increasingly national support for the civil rights legislation. Admittedly, that national support lasted precisely until the moment when civil rights leaders suggested that northern de facto segregated schools needed to be integrated too. So that support was always limited. But Mamie Till holds an enormous amount of credit for changing history through her brave and sacrificing actions.

In fact, Till did not stop her activism with the funeral. She became an important civil rights organizer in Chicago and not just about the memory of her son. She was a powerful speaker. As discussed earlier, she was a highly intelligent person and a great student in a world where she didn’t have any options to use that. Now she did. She remarried once more in 1957, to a man named Gene Mobley. She kept the Till in her name for her son and now became Mamie Till-Mobley. The NAACP hired her to become a speaker traveling the country and telling her story. It didn’t go well because she felt the NAACP wasn’t paying her properly and she and Roy Wilkins got in a heated argument over this. Given what I know about Wilkins, I’m going to guess Till-Mobley was probably on the right side here.

Till-Mobley ended up teaching in Chicago public schools, a great way to make the world better. She did a lot of anti-poverty work in Chicago as well. She started a group called the Emmett Till Players, where she would gather black children interested in acting and have them perform the speeches of Martin Luther King. So that’s a cool project for kids. She later went back and a college degree and then a master’s in education administration from Loyola in Chicago, which she completed in 1971.

Till-Mobley spent her later years continued to fight for the memory of her son and all the horrible things that racism caused. In 2003, she published a memoir titled Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America. She also pushed for federal civil rights legislation. She was critical in the formation of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2008 allowed for the reopening of cold cases of murdered civil rights workers before 1970. John Lewis was the major player in Congress behind this bill. That law was not permanent though and was then reauthorized in 2016. I doubt Republicans would vote for such a law today.

But Till-Mobley was not around for that act which she had called for. She died in 2003, at the age of 81.

Mamie Till-Mobley is buried in Burr Oak Cemetery, Alsip, Illinois. This is the same cemetery as her son, but it is a different part of the cemetery. One imagines when he was buried all the way back in 1955, she had better things to think about than where she would be nearly a half-century later.

If you would like this series to visit other women who played key roles in the civil rights movement, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Ella Baker is in Queens and Daisy Bates is in Little Rock, Arkansas. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.