by Elliott Gorn
What is a history teacher to do? Fingers wag at us from left and right. Do not disturb the students. Issue trigger warnings to your classes. Avoid inducing guilt. Teach patriotic content. Steer clear of violent or disturbing content. Keep the customers satisfied.
Which makes it a good time to remember Mamie Till-Mobley, who would have been 100 years old last month.
Back in the summer of 1955, her 14-year-old son Emmett went down to Money, Miss., to visit family. She hesitated to let him go. Emmett was a high-spirited kid who loved to joke around. He’d been told about Jim Crow rules but didn’t fully understand the danger. Still, she thought he’d be OK.
We know the story. Emmett allegedly whistled at a white woman in a crossroads grocery store (although his mother always believed it was due to his stutter and her teaching him to whistle to calm himself). The woman’s husband and brother-in-law kidnapped Emmett, beat him near to death, shot him in the head and threw him in the Tallahatchie River.
After his body was returned to Chicago and Mamie saw his face, she made the most courageous decision of her life: Hide nothing. She asked the funeral director not to prettify Emmett; she insisted on a glass-topped coffin; she invited a photographer to take pictures.
“Let the people see what they did to my boy,” she said.
One hundred thousand people, mostly South Siders, came to Emmett’s viewing. Disturbed at the spectacle, Southern newspapers called the funeral “Mamie’s circus,” but African Americans — Southern migrants and their children — recognized their history in Emmett’s crushed face.
Emmett’s death photo appeared in Jet magazine, and Black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, and for years African Americans passed along copies, a reminder of racism’s horrors, a “tough love” warning to their children.
A month after the funeral, an all-white, all-male jury convened in Tallahatchie County. Only registered voters served on juries there. Though the county was almost two-thirds African American, voter suppression laws disenfranchised them all.
The evidence was strong, but it took the jurors just an hour to find the defendants not guilty. One juror joked that it would have been quicker had they not stopped for cokes. Others said they refused to be the first jury in Mississippi to convict white men of killing a Black person.
Still, the story lived on. An unprecedented series of mass Emmett Till rallies took place across America. Mamie was their featured speaker. Just two days after the verdict, 10,000 people gathered at a Harlem church. When Mamie rose to speak, the crowd surged forward, breaking through police lines.
These meetings were repeated for months across America, in Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, San Antonio, Boston and Youngstown. Not just the NAACP, but also youth groups, interdenominational religious organizations and labor unions supported the Till rallies.
A working single mother, Mamie had never been a public speaker. “Something happened to me,” she told the crowd in Detroit. “I asked God what I should do. He said to me: ‘If you go, I will go with you.’ ” That is why I’m here, she said, not out of hatred but to give her son’s death meaning, to make it a call for justice.
In Des Moines, she declared, “It is time for us to wake up. We have been asleep for a long time. We have been waiting for someone to come and hand us something — and that is not the way it is going to be.” In Omaha, she told her listeners that her son’s murder was a turning point for America: “Don’t feel sorry for my boy or me. … He has done his job, and mine has just begun.”
The rallies attracted thousands, garnered headlines and kept civil rights in the news. Mamie Till-Mobley gave voice — a woman’s voice, a mother’s voice — to her anguish and her people’s oppression. Her words resonated with Christian imagery — Christ’s agony, Mary’s suffering, the betrayal of innocence and the spilling of guiltless blood. She turned her pain into testimony and raised a prophetic cry against racism.
Eventually, other events such as the Montgomery bus boycott took center stage. But Mamie had found her calling; she would be a teacher.
She earned a degree from Chicago Teachers College and a master’s in education administration from Loyola University. Teaching the truth to children became her cause. She founded a theater troupe for them, The Emmett Till Players. She would not be silent about racism and injustice, about her son’s story. Just before she died, she published with Christopher Benson a fine autobiography, “Death of Innocence.”
Civil rights icons John Lewis, Anne Moody and Muhammad Ali were all around Emmett’s age when he was murdered. All saw the horrible photographs, and all traced their activism to that moment. Countless others carried Emmett’s image into the freedom struggle. It was “emblazoned in their minds,” civil rights leader Joyce Lardner remembered. “It was our symbol.”
Mamie Till-Mobley refused to turn a blind eye to evil. Neither should we, least of all America’s history teachers. We honor her courage in her hundredth year. “Let the people see.”
