by Till-Mobley, Mamie; Benson, Christopher; Jackson, Jesse Rev (FRW)
We are only given a certain amount of time to do what we were sent here to do. You don’t have to be around a long time to share the wisdom of a lifetime. You just have to use your time wisely, efficiently. There is no time to waste.
At Mama’s gravesite at Burr Oak Cemetery, where we had buried Emmett, I watched as they began to lower the coffin, as the pallbearers threw the gloves in, as they dropped the first shovelful of dirt, and prayed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And suddenly, there it was, just as I had seen it before. At Emmett’s funeral. That fluttering, right there at the corner of my eye. I looked only to see it escape me. As if it was flying away. Off into the sky. It was the dove. I saw it again, just for a moment. And then I let it go.
CHAPTER 26
At Scanlon School, I had developed a reputation as a tough teacher. Tough, but understanding. I was known as “the little lady in the Cadillac you don’t mess with.” Yes, I was still driving Cadillacs in the early eighties. Things had been working out so well for Gene at Hanley Dawson that he was selling Cadillacs full-time. Word spread so far about how good he was that everybody was going down to see Gene about buying a car. In addition to the money, we also were still getting all those wonderful incentive trips and we had new Cadillacs all the time. Gene thought they were his, I thought they were mine, but as long as Mama was around, she would always trump both of us. Oh, she did enjoy driving those cars.
So, anyway, I was tough. But I felt that I had to be. I could see what some of the kids couldn’t see for themselves. It was my job to see these things. How important their education would be, how many sacrifices had been made for the opportunities they had, how tragic it would be to waste any part of their lives. I looked at my kids and I saw what they were going to be. And I never let up. I found myself once backing a boy into a wall, grabbing his collar, and laying it all out for him. Now, I’m barely five feet tall on my tiptoes, and this kid was nearly a foot taller than I was, so the first reaction everybody had was utter shock. But I was not giving up on him, and I was not about to let him give up on himself. Oh, no, that was not going to happen. I told him I was his last chance and that he was going to do well if it killed him. I never let up. He was going to be a better student, a better person if it killed me. It was a challenge. His father was not around, his mother had a drinking problem, nobody had ever done more than just move him along. He had no respect for women. But I knew from my own experience that when a man, or even a man-child, has no respect for women, it’s because he has no respect for himself. No one had ever shown him they cared about him, or that he should care about himself, for that matter. I showed him. I proved it. He settled down, he applied himself, he adjusted to being a good student. I was tough. But it was tough love. A parent’s love. I used the strong arm of a father and the tender touch of a mother to get through to my kids. They knew I loved them when I didn’t have to, and that made an impression. The ones who turned out the best were the ones who could work their way through the tough part and feel the love. Everybody has had that one teacher who turned a life around, made something click, made a difference. For so many children, I was that teacher and nothing would give me more satisfaction than to hear that from former students over the years. I moved them to want to become the best they could possibly become, and they knew that becoming was an ongoing process. They learned to keep their eyes on the horizon, and to never, never let up.
One day in 1982 I got a call. I was at home that day and not in school because the Chicago teachers were out on a job action for better working conditions. It seemed that the people who appreciated us the most were the kids we were helping. But we needed help in order to provide help. The call was from a former student of mine. It was Odel Sterling, the boy who had worked through his stutter by learning Dr. King’s speeches. He wanted to come over to my house and bring a few of his friends. I told him they could all come. And, oh, my, there were about eight of these boys who showed up at my place. I had to wonder what this was all about. Well, they told me. They wanted to be in school. I was shocked. But that’s what they said. They wanted the teachers to go back so that they could go back. I explained what the action was all about, that there was more than money involved, and they seemed to understand that.
Then something happened. I noticed that they were kind of hanging their heads, and I never wanted kids to do that. I would tell them about that sort of thing all the time. “We’re not in Mississippi anymore. We have rights. Hold your heads up.”
One of the boys lifted his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry for what? I said it was okay for you to come by.”
Odel explained. “We’re gang members.”
My goodness. Eight members of the Black Gangster Disciples sitting right there in my living room. And they were telling me they wanted to get off the streets and go back to school. They were reaching out to me because somehow I had reached them. Some had been students of mine, others only knew about me. But they were looking for help. The teachers’ action would sort itself out, but the most important thing to me was making a point with these boys, a point I always made with my Emmett Till Players. Life is all about choices. Every choice you make comes at the expense of so many other choices you could have made. We must be careful to consider all our choices, and what they will cost us. I could only hope that they were thinking about what I was saying as much as I was thinking about it myself. The choices I had made. The costs I had paid.
Later, Odel would take part in one last school assembly I would produce before my retirement. He did the “I Have a Dream” speech. And he did it with such power and passion that the entire assembly was silent for a moment after he finished. Just a moment. People had been so moved by him that they couldn’t move themselves. Finally, there was an outpouring of appreciation. Teachers were in tears. They recalled the day Dr. King delivered the speech and what it had meant to all of us. And the students would learn all that.
Odel walked over to me after the assembly. “I’m through,” he said. “I’m getting out of the gang.”
I looked at him and I knew he knew how proud I felt. “Well,” I said, “the only one who can get out is you.”
I had always been firm with my students. But I also gave them some room to figure things out, to solve problems without having the solutions dictated to them. I knew that success as a teacher was not seeing a child meet your expectations. True success was in seeing a child exceed your expectations. Children can only excel when they are given a chance to go beyond merely solving the immediate problem, when they reach the point of learning an important lesson in problem solving, working it through themselves.
That is the lesson Emmett taught me when he would not allow me to walk him through his school assignments. And, oh, how I wanted to help him, especially with his writing and his spelling. But he only wanted me to answer a question here, a question there, and then he’d stop me: “Okay, okay. I got it.”
What he had gotten was just enough to go and work it through himself. The confidence he gained from doing that made him believe he could do anything, solve any problems he confronted. I remembered how disappointed I had been when Emmett hadn’t allowed me to see him through the process. That was because I didn’t fully understand the process back then. Now I could quietly thank my son: “Okay, Bo. Okay. I got it.”
So, I guess I had given Odel just enough to figure the rest out on his own. There was no future in gangbanging. That was a choice that would cost way too much. At least five of the other boys who had come to see me with Odel that day also would quit the gang. Two others who stayed in were killed. Odel and I would enjoy a special relationship long after I moved on from teaching. He would make good choices, profitable ones. His mother, a minister, would be so pleased to see her son graduate from Southwest Baptist University and become an investigator with the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, and provide service as a motivational speaker and church deacon. Through it all, Odel would always remember the speech he ha
d learned, in part, to impress me. “I Have a Dream.” The speech that helped him lose his stutter. The speech that helped him find his direction.
Following my retirement from teaching in 1983, I was able to step up my work with my church and with the Emmett Till Players. Gene would tell people that I was working harder in retirement than I had all the years I held jobs. Occasionally, I would still get requests from local, Chicago-area churches and community groups to speak. But retirement also would give me more time with family, and I was so happy about that. Gene and I were able to spend more time fishing and traveling with Lou and Reverend Mobley. Yes, Wealthy might have dismissed me when I first suggested that he become a preacher, but my voice kept playing back in his head over the next ten years that followed our little chat. He would get more and more involved with his church until he was called to the ministry in 1974. By 1988, he would establish his own church, the Gospel Truth Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago, and Gene and I would be right there to help in every way we could. Pretty much the way I had envisioned it. In the meantime, there was so much joy in the moments we all had together, especially during our travels. We even drove down to Mississippi once to visit Uncle Crosby and see the new home he was building. But I’ll never forget the monthlong trip we made out to California when Lou and I sat in the back of their new 1985 Crown Victoria and played Uno. We spent three days touring the Grand Canyon, and Reverend Mobley was acknowledged by the congregation of a Los Angeles church we visited. He was invited to preach the sermon.
In addition to the family bonding, 1985 was a very important year for me for another reason. It was the thirtieth anniversary of Emmett’s murder and the Sumner trial. Every fifth year since 1955, I had been contacted by media. I would relive the tragedy in newspapers and on television, most of it local. But the thirtieth anniversary was different. There was a spark. There seemed to be even greater interest in the Emmett Till story than at other times, interest that came from way beyond Chicago. Maybe the country had just needed time to process everything. It had been a generation since we had seen the great victories of the civil rights movement, the social, legal, and political changes. The country had been so caught up in the sheer energy, the drive of the movement, and the afterglow that it had taken a while for people to sit down and reflect on the causes of the effects.
There were so many calls and interviews that year. A wonderful documentary was produced by the NBC television station in Chicago. The reporter Rich Samuels and his production team actually tracked down Roy Bryant in Mississippi, but Bryant wouldn’t talk. That documentary wound up winning an Emmy Award. But, more important, the attention to the story created even more interest and the calls kept coming. Then in 1987, a major documentary series was shown on Public Broadcasting Service stations all across the country. Eyes on the Prize was an acclaimed documentary on the significant developments in the civil rights movement. The first segment showed the spark for the movement that came from the events surrounding the murder of Emmett Till.
I was delighted to have the chance to meet Henry Hampton, the documentary producer, when I was in Boston that year to receive an award. My cousin Thelma Wright Edwards was living there at the time and we talked to him about his work and Emmett and Thelma’s father, Uncle Moses. Of course, we couldn’t help pointing out a few details that only family members would have known.
By this time, the requests for public appearances really began to pick up. We had been through nearly two full terms of the Reagan administration and there was a lot of concern, a lot of anxiety about civil rights. Something had shifted. New leaders were bringing a new message on social issues and government policy. People were raising questions about things that had been beyond question for so many years, questions about the fairness of so many things that had been done to achieve fairness. Conservatives wanted to turn back the clock on social progress. So people were interested in talking about civil rights. Not just current policies, but the history of it all. It was important for everybody to understand what I had been teaching my students and my Emmett Till Players, that great sacrifices had been made for the progress we had seen. I was becoming part of this dialogue. It was what I had wanted for such a long time. After all, the story of the civil rights movement would be incomplete without a discussion of Emmett Till. And who could discuss Emmett Till better than his mother? Thank God I had prepared myself. I had read everything I could get my hands on. And I had been getting practice at public speaking with the local churches and other groups that had invited me over the years after that college speech class, where I had eulogized Emmett. Beyond all that, though, I had studied the master, as I considered the important meaning and style of all those speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the ones I had been sharing with my kids.
In 1988, I was honored to be invited by Mrs. Coretta Scott King to make a presentation at a very special event sponsored by the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. The event was called “Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers.” It was to be a four-day conference held that October and would include an impressive lineup of women. I turned to Gene, who told me he would be delighted to go with me, as he was for so many out-of-town appearances yet to come. But this one was to be the first big one for me, and I wanted to do a good job. I felt that I owed that to the people who were coming, looking for answers. I was told to prepare for fifteen minutes, but I brought plenty of material to go longer, just in case.
My presentation during the conference was held in a room that filled up very quickly. Someone wound up moving a back wall and that gave us the other half of the room. As that second section began to fill up, they started opening the two side panels of the room. It seemed like everybody at the conference had come to this session. Every chair was taken. People were standing. They were sitting on the floor. I wound up going for much longer than fifteen minutes and I was so pleased that I had prepared myself for a longer period.
At one point, as I was speaking and looking out at the huge crowd, my attention was drawn to an entrance where I saw two more people walking in. It was Mrs. Coretta Scott King and Mrs. Rosa Parks. Oh, I was just ecstatic to have them come to hear me. And, as I continued my talk, I suddenly felt so connected. There was a bond between me and them, even across the room. I wanted to talk to them, but things were hectic as we broke up, and I didn’t get the chance.
Later, as Gene and I walked into the reception that evening, the first person I saw was Mrs. King, who came over to greet me. “Well, finally we meet,” she said.
I wasn’t sure at first what she meant by that, but I certainly was thrilled to meet her. She was so warm, so gracious. As it turns out, what she meant was that I had never responded to other invitations that had been sent to me over the years. Invitations to attend the 1963 March on Washington and the funeral of Dr. King in 1968. I didn’t know anything about those invitations. I had never received them and didn’t really have time to consider it much right then because things were moving so quickly. There was so much excitement with so many important people at the reception. Dr. Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, hugged me and kissed me and made me feel so welcome. There would be many hugs and kisses that evening, many greetings, but there would be one embrace that would be especially dear to me. The last one. The one that came rushing over to me. The one that held on so tightly. One I would hold on to for so many years to come. It was the one from Mrs. Rosa Parks.
It was almost as if she was apologizing for something, trying to make up for something. I shared that feeling. It just seemed like we should have met so many years before we did. But we would waste no time making up for lost time. I would bring my kids up to Detroit, where she was living, to perform their program. Some of my kids also would participate in her “Pathways to Freedom,” a bus tour that familiarizes children with the significance of the Underground Railroad. She and I would also be there for each other during the special times, like when she w
ould receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. Gene and I would become very close friends with Rosa Parks and Elaine Eason Steele, the cofounder and director of the Rosa & Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. Over the years, we would share so much appreciation and so much love. We would share something else, too. Something that had connected us for so many years. Something that should have brought us together so many years before. It was that something that had made us hug each other so tightly when we met. Rosa Parks would tell me how she felt about Emmett, how she had thought about him on that fateful day when she took that historic stand by keeping her seat.
At the King Center event, I would be puzzled for some time about what Mrs. King had said to me, about those invitations that had never reached me. It was so nice, so satisfying to learn finally that I had not been left behind after all. That people had tried to include me in the events that unfolded after Emmett’s death. That’s when I realized what had happened. Mama. Oh, Mama. I thought about how she had never wanted me to consider being in the thick of it all during the 1960s, how concerned she had been for my own well-being, how she had wanted to keep me close, keep me safe, and told me I had plenty of other things to do. I thought about how she had been there so often to help sort my mail. And open it. Mama had intercepted those invitations. She did it to protect me. I thought about it and I understood it. As only a mother could.
In 1989, there was another special invitation. The Civil Rights Memorial was being dedicated at the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery. Morris Dees, the head of the organization, is a passionate and committed lawyer, who dedicated his career to fighting injustice, and who engineered a major blow to the Ku Klux Klan when he won a seven-million-dollar judgment against the Klan on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald in the lynching death of her son, Michael Donald. That judgment left the KKK bankrupt. Morris Dees raised money to commission a monument by Maya Lin to commemorate the sacrifices made by so many during the civil rights movement. Along with major events, the names of forty people were etched in black granite. Emmett’s was included.