Emmett Till

by Devery S. Anderson

  Yet Emmett Till was murdered, and his brutal death and the injustice that followed permanently altered the lives and legacies of many. After the verdict was read, once the speeches were over, and the protests had waned, what happened to the key players in this sad southern tale? Some prospered, while others struggled. For a few, life was simply tragic. Among those still living, some are affable when approached, others, aloof. One or two refuse to talk about the case at all.

  Mamie Bradley never returned to her job at the air force office in Chicago. Her rift with the NAACP left her tainted in some circles as greedy and exploitive of her son’s death. Before she could deal with that, she had other priorities. She had said just after Emmett’s death that mourning would have to wait, but the time for unrestrained grief finally arrived in the late fall.

  About two months after the trial, Mamie walked downstairs at her home to use her washing machine for the first time since before Emmett’s death. The murder, the trial, and the rallies had left her no time for domestic chores, and she left most of them to her mother. As she tried to run the washer on this occasion, the wringer failed to work. “I called my mother crying, telling her that Emmett had broken the machine and he hadn’t told me,” she said in an interview six years before her death. Blaming Emmett was her attempt to bring him back into her daily routine, as she explained. “I was just so carried away in grief that I guess I was glad to be able to call her and tell her something about Emmett even if it was something that I thought was negative—breaking the wringer and not telling me.” Alma instructed Mamie to go downstairs and tighten it. That fixed the problem. “I ran back upstairs, and I cried. I said, ‘Mama, it’s not broken, it’s ok.’ It was just such an emotional moment with me.”1

  With this, Mamie found herself on the path toward healing. Speeches sponsored by labor unions kept her in the public eye occasionally through 1956, but it was her serialized memoir, “Mamie Bradley’s Untold Story,” published in the spring in both the Daily Defender and Chicago Defender that helped redeem her in the eyes of many. In October 1956, she flew to Washington, DC, as one of 400 women who attended the “Ladies Lunch for Adlai” fund-raiser on behalf of Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. There she met former president Harry S. Truman and publicly threw her support behind Stevenson. She also chastised President Eisenhower for ignoring the telegram she had sent him just after Emmett’s murder. Stevenson shortly wired Mamie to thank her for her support and assured her that he and his running mate, Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, were “dedicated to the all-important realization of the democratic rights and guaranteeing the protection of all citizens.”2

  Around this time, Mamie began a self-imposed exile from the national spotlight. This began when she enrolled at Chicago Teachers College in the fall of 1956. She graduated cum laude three-and-a-half years later. Soon after she began her studies, Congressman William Dawson learned that Mamie was in need of a piano for her course work and purchased one for her. When Mamie flew to Washington in October for the women’s luncheon, she was so dedicated to her studies that she took a stack of books and did homework on the plane. Chicago Defender correspondent Ethel Payne even came to her aid, reading aloud from Mamie’s English text.3 Mamie earned her degree in January 1960 and commenced teaching at Carter Elementary. She later moved to Scanlon School and retired in 1983 after a total of twenty-three years with Chicago’s public schools.4

  On June 24, 1957, thirty-five-year-old Mamie Bradley married Gene Mobley, her boyfriend of three years. The wedding took place in the home of Bishop Isaiah Roberts, who had served as host pastor of Emmett’s funeral nearly two years earlier. This union lasted forty-three years, ending only with Gene’s death in 2000. Mamie, who became known as Mamie Till-Mobley, never bore another child; instead, she helped nurture Gene’s two daughters, Lillian and Yvonne, after their mother moved from Chicago.5

  Neither Mamie nor her attorneys ever sued the Milams and Bryants as promised throughout the murder trial. However, in January 1958 she filed a $1 million suit against Look magazine over two articles written by William Bradford Huie published in January 1956 and January 1957. The first was the “confession” piece; the second was a follow-up on the acquitted half-brothers that appeared one year later. The complaint insisted that both articles were libelous and held Mamie “up to scorn and ridicule.” Defendants named in the case were Cowles Magazines, Inc.; publisher Vernon C. Myers; editor Gardner Cowles; and Huie. Seventeen months later on June 22, 1959, a Chicago circuit judge dismissed the suit after he was persuaded by arguments from Look attorneys. They insisted that the stories were matters of public interest and also pointed out that the only mention of Mamie noted that she was the victim’s mother.6 She appealed the judgment, but in May 1960 the Illinois Appellate Court upheld the original decision. The following October, she took her case to the Illinois State Supreme Court but did not prevail there either.7

  In 1960, Mamie sold the home she co-owned with her mother, and in January 1961, one year after her college graduation, she and Gene moved to a new home on Wabash Avenue.8 By Mamie’s own admission, the civil rights movement went on without her, and she watched from the sidelines the triumphs of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the tragedy of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and everything in between. She did protest one injustice, however, but it was not part of the movement. In 1970, she picketed in front of the National Tea Company store in Chicago where a black man named Alonzo Cushmeer had been killed. Her sign, “National Use Corporate Structure to Corrall [sic] People,” indicated that the tea company had taken no responsibility in Cushmeer’s death.9

  In the mid-1960s, Mamie’s mother, Alma Spearman, formed the Emmett Till Foundation. The goals of the organization were to build Christian character and a sense of citizenship in young people and to erect an interdenominational and interracial facility called the Emmett Till Center, which would serve to memorialize the slain youth. The foundation held its first annual banquet in Chicago on July 23, 1966. The planned center never came to fruition, but the nonprofit organization began a long tradition of awarding scholarships to deserving youth annually on July 25, Emmett’s birthday.10

  Mamie created an additional way of keeping her son’s memory alive by establishing a performing group in 1973. This happened quite by accident after the principal at Carter Elementary assigned her the task of honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. during a school assembly. She checked out three record albums from the school library that contained King’s speeches and became so engrossed in them that she stayed awake all night transferring them to cassette tape while simultaneously transcribing them. Children selected from the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades then memorized the speeches and recited them during the program three weeks later.11 With this, the Emmett Till Players were born, and over the years they continued memorizing and performing. Older children eventually moved on, while younger ones replaced them. They performed at schools and churches, and a decade after its founding, Mamie estimated that over 200 children had been part of the troupe. In 1984, the group even performed in Mississippi.12

  Outside of teaching school, running the Emmett Till Foundation, and leading the Players, Mamie remained busy. In May 1973, she helped found the Evangelistic Crusader Church of God in Christ, and two years after that earned a master’s degree in administration and supervision from Loyola University, with an additional forty-five credits toward a doctorate.13

  These first twenty years after the trial had been personally challenging for Mamie, yet they were also rewarding. During the fifteen years that followed, she received validation on three important occasions that Emmett’s death had not been in vain. This fact became tangible—cast in bronze, etched in stone, and posted in procession above the hustle and bustle of Chicago’s South Side.

  This first such occasion occurred in 1976, not in Chicago or in the South, but in Colorado. At a ceremony held on Sunday, September 5, in Denver City Park, local officials unveiled a $110,000, twenty-foot statue d
esigned and cast by Boulder artist Ed Rose. The idea for the sculpture came in 1973 by Herman Hamilton, a Denver bowling alley owner from Money, Mississippi, who was nine years old when Emmett Till was murdered. It depicted Martin Luther King Jr. and Emmett Till standing together. The project had been sponsored by the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Foundation, with a grant from the Colorado Centennial-Bicentennial Commission.14 Till’s August 28, 1955, murder and King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech occurred exactly eight years apart.

  Mamie attended the two-hour ceremony with family and the Emmett Till Players, who performed. The towering statue portrayed a forward-looking King with his arm around the young lynching victim. When Mamie first gazed upon it, she could hardly contain her emotions, and Alma filled in at the podium until her daughter could regain her composure. When Mamie finally spoke, she told the hundreds gathered that “Emmett was too young to fight for his country . . . but his death freed a nation from the shackles of fear.” Denver was a fitting place for the statue because that city had been “moving with amazing speed toward the promised land of equality and the realization of justice.” Governor Dick Lamm and other state and community leaders also attended the event.15

  Emmett Till was honored once again on November 5, 1989, in Montgomery, Alabama, where Mamie was one of several guests invited to speak at the dedication of the Civil Rights Memorial there. Unveiled on the plaza of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the beautiful $700,000 monument had been conceived two years earlier by Morris Dees, executive director of the center. Dees wanted to honor several lesser-known figures who had died in the struggle for civil rights. The monument was designed by Maya Lin, who also created the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC.

  The memorial features a fitting quotation from King, taken from Amos 5:24, and embedded in a granite wall: “Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

  Appropriately, water flows down the wall and over the words, as it also does on a granite table, twelve feet in diameter, which sits a few feet away. The table contains a chronology of the civil rights movement and the names of forty of its martyrs. The third name on the list is Emmett Till, identified as a “youth murdered for speaking to white woman.” A photo captured Mamie running her fingers over her son’s name as she accepted this recognition with reverence.

  Five thousand people attended the ceremony. Guests included Rosa Parks, Julian Bond, Martin Luther King III, and Ethel Kennedy. Mamie told the crowd that in the South, Emmett’s death was “just one of those things,” but this memorial, located two blocks from the site of Jefferson Davis’s inauguration as president of the Confederacy, was a reminder to the world “that Emmett’s death was not just one of those things.” Besides Mamie, other speakers included Chris McNair, father of Denise McNair, who was killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and Carolyn Goodman and Rita Schwerner Bender, mother and widow, respectively, of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two of three Freedom Summer workers who were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964. They all stood together to sing the Civil Rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.”16

  Perhaps the greatest moment of fulfillment for Mamie came when the city of Chicago renamed a major street after her slain child. On July 25, 1991, Emmett’s fiftieth birthday, a seven-mile stretch of Seventy-First Street was renamed Emmett Till Road. A ceremony featured the Emmett Till Players, Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, former mayor Eugene Sawyer, and Rosa Parks. “I feel if I had the voice of 10,000 angels, I could not express what this day means to me personally, for the city of Chicago and the world,” Mamie said at the event. “This is a culmination of a lifetime of dreams.” Daley explained to the crowd that the naming of Emmett Till Road “is to commemorate a victim of racial hatred that exists in America, even today.”17

  One of the final highlights for Mamie came on March 7, 2000, when she finally became, at least symbolically, part of the civil rights movement that she had earlier watched from afar. She and Gene, along with hundreds of others, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, as part of the thirty-fifth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.” That original protest, carried out in 1965, was the first of three attempted civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, where marchers were halted on the bridge, attacked with tear gas, beaten with clubs, and driven back. Leading the way in the anniversary march, signifying a new America for the twenty-first century, was President Bill Clinton. Ethel Kennedy and civil rights veterans Jesse Jackson and John Lewis were also present. Sadly, less than two weeks later, Gene Mobley became ill and died.18

  Although widowed, Mamie Till-Mobley’s life remained eventful for the next three years as she continued her activities with the Emmett Till Foundation. She also traveled and spoke, despite the heart and kidney problems she had long battled. In fact, it was on January 6, 2003, the eve of a planned departure for an event in Atlanta, that she suffered a heart attack. She died that afternoon at Jackson Park Hospital. She was eighty-one years old.19

  At her funeral a few days later at the Apostolic Church of God, 2,000 mourners gathered to pay tribute to this largely unsung, yet still emerging heroine. “The struggle for our emancipation is a history of strong, magnificent women,” said Rev. Jesse Jackson. He likened her to such notable black women as Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Rosa Parks. “In many ways the killers saw (Till’s death) as a hole, but Mamie saw an earthquake, and she used the aftershocks of the earthquake to wake up and shake up a nation.” Other speakers were Representative Bobby Rush and former Illinois senator and US ambassador Carol Moseley Braun.20

  Six years before her death, Mamie Till-Mobley described her feelings toward the two men who had killed her son over forty years earlier. “Mercifully, the Lord just erased them out of my mind, out of my sight, with no conscious feelings toward them. Not hate, not love.” As she reflected on the different paths their lives had taken in the years following the trial, however, she noted with some satisfaction, “I became a benefactor to society, they became a scourge to society.”21

  As a benefactor, Mamie Till-Mobley gave much in return, and her influence was felt most among the children she mentored. The loss of one child launched her on a path to saving others. One of those, Odel Sterling III, performed at her funeral and told Jet magazine, “I had a dream and it was that I wanted to speak.” Like Emmett, Sterling had suffered from a speech impediment, but Mamie helped him overcome it by memorizing King’s speeches. Sterling was one of the first to join the Emmett Till Players in the early 1970s. Today, he is a minister and continues to recite those speeches around the country.22

  Although Mamie Till-Mobley’s name has not achieved the recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks, students of the civil rights movement know her well. When she insisted on an open casket in September 1955 for the world to see the battered face of her son, she made an impact that can only be described as immeasurable, as visual images preserve in memory what the written word cannot. Even today, those introduced to the Till murder who see those photos feel at one with the shaken crowds who filed past that open casket decades earlier.23

  Thankfully, Mose Wright lived long enough to hear of the honor his great-nephew received in Denver City Park. For most of the twenty-two years Wright lived in Argo, Illinois, after testifying in Sumner, he did so quietly, outside the public eye. Upon arriving in the North, Mose, Elizabeth, and their three young sons stayed briefly with Mose’s daughter, Willie Mae Jones, but soon moved to the second-floor apartment in a house owned by Mose’s son, James, which stood next door to Mamie and Emmett’s former home on Sixty-Fourth Street.24

  Wright’s speaking engagements, like those of Mamie, lasted only a few months.25 A year after the trial he reported that he was working odd jobs and had even gained thirteen pounds since moving to the North. “I used to think I couldn’t live without seeing cotton stalks. Man, I ain’t seen cotton in a year and I’m still living.” The former preacher had already come to se
e the impact of the Till case on the fledgling civil rights movement, and stated, almost prophetically, “What happened down there last year is going to help us all.”26

  Wright eventually found work as a custodian at a nightclub and later as a dishwasher at a local restaurant, working alongside his grandson, Milton Parker.27 Adjusting to the big city after spending a lifetime in the rural Mississippi Delta was not easy. “At that age you can’t really make that adjustment,” said his youngest son, Simeon. Mose, who left his car behind in Mississippi, never drove again after his move to Argo, but with the close proximity of stores and schools, and the availability of public transportation, he did not need to. He gave up fishing after leaving the South, but the railroad let him use a little patch of land on which to grow a garden, which he kept up until he was seventy-nine. “That was his joy,” recalled Simeon.28