Mamie Till-Mobley (1921-2003)

Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley was born Mamie Elizabeth Carthan on November 23, 1921, in Webb, Mississippi, approximately 20 miles southeast of Clarksdale. Mamie was the second child of John Wiley Nash Carthan and Alma Carthan (née Wright). Shortly after Mamie’s birth, her father took a job at the Argo Corn Products Company in Summitt, Illinois, then the world’s largest corn processing plant. In 1924, Alma, Mamie joined John Wiley Nash in an area colloquially known as Argo, after the factory. Nash and Alma would divorce in 1934. Mamie attended Argo Community High School and was the fourth Black American graduate of the school and the first African-American student to make the honor roll. At eighteen, Mamie met and married Louis Till, a native of New Madrid, Missouri, who worked at the Argo Corn Products Company. 

Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25, 1941, at Cook County Hospital. Mamie and Louis Till would divorce when Emmett was just a toddler after an episode of domestic violence forced Louis to choose between service in the United States Army, or serve jail time. As a result, Emmett never spent significant time with his father and was raised primarily by his mother and his grandmother, who by then had moved to Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood.

Mamie’s image regularly appears in print in 1955 alongside those of her son. These photos capture Mamie in pronounced states of grief, as she meets her son’s coffin at the Illinois Central Train Station, as she attends the funeral, and at Emmett’s burial site. These images solidify the horrors of Emmett’s lynching in much the same fashion as the images of Emmett’s body Mamie Till-Mobley would demand that the public see. Mamie would be regularly interviewed by the press, an action that kept the story in circulation.

After the trial of Emmett’s murderers concluded, Mamie toured with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to help “finance the fight.” Mamie would appear nationwide, at civil rights rallies, union halls, and at NAACP events. 1956, the Chicago Defender and the Daily Defender published “Mamie Bradley’s Untold Story,” providing Mamie and opportunity to tell her story in print. In October 1956, Mamie attended a fundraiser on behalf of Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. At this fundraiser, she met President Harry S. Truman and publicly threw her support behind Stevenson for president. In the fall of 1956, Mamie enrolled at the Chicago Teachers College, graduating cum laude in January 1960. Upon graduation, she began teaching at Carter Elementary at 5730 South Wabash in Chicago and later, at Scanlon Elementary School (later renamed Songhai Learning Institute) at 11725 South Perry Avenue. In 1975 Mamie Till-Mobley would earn a master’s degree in educational administration from Loyola University. She retired in 1983 after teaching twenty-three years in Chicago Public Schools. 

Mamie married Gene Mobley in 1958, taking his last name. In 1965, Mamie Till-Mobley and Alma Carthan would form the Emmett Till Foundation, a non-profit organization that awarded scholarships annually on July 25th, Emmett’s birthday. Prompted by a task given to her by the principal at Carter Elementary in 1973 to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. during a school assembly, Mamie Till-Mobley formed the Emmett Till Players, a group that performed speeches at schools and churches nationwide. In 1989, Mamie spoke at the dedication of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. In 2000, Mamie symbolically crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama with other participants in the civil rights movement, as a part of the thirty-fifth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” a civil rights march that was halted on the bridge, where marchers like John Lewis were attacked and driven back. That same year, Till-Mobley traveled to Mississippi with Reverend Jesse Jackson, Jr. to attend a rally and march calling for an investigation into the death that year of seventeen-year-old Raynard Johnson, who was found hanging from a tree in his front yard in Kokomo, Mississippi, dead, under circumstances that resembled a lynching. Johnson’s death was ruled a suicide by Mississippi authorities, despite evidence that foul play had occurred. Mamie Till-Mobley died on January 6, 2003, at Jackson Park Hospital.  

In 2022, the United States Congress awarded the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously to Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley. The medal is on display at the National Museum of African American History. 

Emmett Louis Till (1941-1955) 

Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25th, 1941 at Cook County Hospital. After his birth, Emmett lived with Mamie and Louis Till. After Mamie and Louis separated, Emmett and Mamie lived with Alma Carthan until Mamie married Pink Bradley, and the two left for Detroit. Emmett was known as ‘Bobo’ (or simply, ‘Bo’) to family and friends, a nickname given to him when he was in the womb. At age six, Emmett contracted Polio. While his motor skills were not affected, the disease left Emmett with a speech disorder. To help with his stuttering, Mamie taught Emmett how to whistle. Emmett attended James McCosh Elementary on 6543 South Champlain Avenue. 

Character sketches of Emmett Till provided by Mamie Till-Mobley, his cousins and friends convey that Emmett was a typical teenage boy who read Superman comics, enjoyed playing and telling jokes, and worked small odd jobs for his neighbors. Emmett enjoyed comedy, including George Gobel and Abbott and Costello.  Emmett spent his free time with his cousins and friends, both in Woodlawn and in Argo, with a streetcar running up and down 63rd street providing the means for Emmett to visit Argo on his own, the trip taking a half hour. Emmett’s cousins express a fondness of practical jokes and mischievousness. By accounts, Emmett was extroverted and displayed a high level of peer awareness. 

In Tight Little Island, Emmett’s 7th-grade teacher at McCosh School, Edward Spears, shared how Emmett had responded to a prompt on how students were to spend their summer vacation by sharing that he planned to visit his cousins in Mississippi. Spears also provides an anecdote on Emmett’s behavior; “I thought about how the girls would certainly miss his pulling their hair or snatching their belongings, so they would chase him. Because he could be egged on to take almost any dare, he was also popular with the boys. Each day he created at least one laughable moment for the class. No matter what the task, his voice rose about the others as a volunteer.” Spears adds, “Little did we realize that this chubby, fun-loving student, who could be described as a “typical boy,” would soon be a martyr.” 

Emmett’s Trip to Mississippi

In the Summer of 1955, Mamie’s Uncle Moses “Mose” Wright and his wife Elizabeth invited Emmett and his cousin Wheeler Parker Jr., who was two years older, to spend two weeks on his farm near Money, Mississippi. He would be abducted and lynched eight days after arriving in Mississippi. In Death of Innocence, Mamie conveys that she spoke to Emmett explicitly about race and how he needed to be mindful of how he addressed white people, particularly white women, but that Emmett didn’t seem to absorb her instructions. During the trip, Emmett and Wheeler would assist their uncle in the fields in the morning when the temperature was cooler, leaving the hotter afternoons and evenings for socializing. 

On the morning of August 20th, 1955, Emmett, Wheeler and Mose, who had been in Chicago already, boarded The City of New Orleans at the Englewood Station at 63rd Street and Woodlawn. Offering multiple trips per day, the diesel-powered coach streamliner of The City of New Orleans offered air-conditioned Pullman Cars, and featured a dining car and observation lounge. While there were no Jim Crow laws in Illinois, the railroads, including the Illinois Central, segregated their passengers at their point of departure and enforced segregation throughout the trip, particularly as trains approached Cairo, Illinois, just north of the Kentucky border. According to an account in The Chicago Defender from 1946, Black Americans were often forced to stand or sit in aisles to accommodate white passengers. Once the train arrived at the Illinois Central Depot in Grenada, Mississippi, the group traveled by car to Mose’s farm, where they joined Mose and Elizabeth’s three sons, Maurice, Robert and Simeon, as well as another cousin, Curtis. 

For the next four days, Emmett and his cousins picked cotton in the morning and spent the afternoons and evenings listening to the radio or reading comics, or piling into Mose’s car for a drive with sixteen-year-old Maurice at the wheel.

In the early evening of Wednesday, August 24th, Maurice, Wheeler, Simeon, Emmett and two friends, cousins Roosevelt and Ruthie Crawford, took Mose’s car into town. Money, Mississippi was an unincorporated community in Leflore County, near the city of Greenwood, with a population of about 500. Going “into town” meant visiting the small commercial strip of Money along County Road 518. The strip included a service station, a cotton mill and Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market. The objective of the group was to purchase items at Bryants, a store owned by Roy Bryant and his wife, Corolyn, who was working alone at the counter. Each of the children in the group entered the store one by one.

Kidnapping and Lynching

Accounts of the interaction between Emmett Till and Carolyn Bryant in the store differ across time and perspectives laden with racial stereotypes and implicit bias. According to interpretation by white bystanders the interaction was dialogue-heavy, sexual, and threatening. According to interpretation by Black bystanders, it was brief, proper, and transactional. Emmett Till, a Black boy, went into the store and purchased bubble gum from a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. Carolyn Bryant leveled a charge of impropriety against Emmett and communicated this to her husband, Roy Bryant. Roy Bryant enlisted his half-brother J.W. Milam, to kidnap the “boy from Chicago” during the early morning hours of Sunday, August 28, 1955, as he lay in a bed shared with his cousin Simeon at Mose’s house. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam tortured Emmett, then shot him, killing him. They then tossed Till’s body in the Tallahatchie River, weighing it down with a gin fan.

Mamie was alerted that Emmett had been taken on Sunday, August 28th, the morning after his abduction. The press began reporting on Emmett Till’s abduction on Monday, August 29, beginning with outlets in Mississippi and Louisiana. Mamie Till-Mobley alerted the Chicago branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) seeking assistance. Press coverage would expand nationwide on Tuesday, August 30th, including the Chicago Tribune, publishing an account of the kidnapping from Wheeler Parker. On the morning of Wednesday, August 31st, Mamie Till-Mobley had been notified that her son’s body had been found by a fisherman. Press coverage would respond that same day, reporting that Emmett Till had been found murdered, and that the kidnapping charge against Bryant and Milam had been upgraded to murder. The Leflore County Sheriff insisted that Till be buried immediately in Mississippi, but the Black undertaker that received the body worked with Mamie Till-Mobley to transfer the body back to Chicago via train for a funeral and burial there. 

Funeral at Robert’s Temple Church of God in Christ

It was at the highly publicized funeral at the Robert’s Temple Church of God in Christ where the outrage at Emmett Till’s lynching was broadcasted across the nation. Attendees reacted not only to the condition of Till’s body but to the plight of Black Americans and racial injustice in America. Emmett Till’s funeral galvanized action for the modern Civil Rights Movement. In The Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America, Mamie Till-Mobley described her desire for the public to view Emmett’s body:

“So I wanted to make it as real and as visible to people as I could possibly make it. I knew that if they walked by that casket, if people could see it with their own eyes, then together we might find a way to express what we had seen. It was important to do that, I thought, to help people recognize the horrible problems we were facing in the South.”

According to Mamie Till-Mobley, five thousand people visited Emmett’s body at A. A. Rayner & Sons Funeral Home on Friday, September 2nd, and they would go on until the chapel closed at two in the morning. Mamie Till-Mobley accounts the first night; “I left close to midnight, it seemed that there were hundreds still waiting to get in. I stopped to speak to them. I felt that I had to.”

The open casket visitation and funeral was held at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, Alma Carthan’s first church in Chicago, where Alma Carthan had been sent when she first moved to Argo from Mississippi, there not being an Argo COGIC church at that time. Bishop Isaiah Roberts, the Pastor of Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, would serve as the host pastor, and Bishop Louis Henry Ford of the St. Paul Church of God in Christ, Alma’s new minister, would deliver the eulogy during the funeral. After thousands were unable to view the body on the first day, Mamie decided to delay the burial from Monday, September 5th to Tuesday, September 6th to allow more mourners to visit. This decision also provided the press with more opportunities to cover the visitation and funeral. 

The funeral was covered in newspapers across the world, with a focus on not only how many people attended the funeral itself, but the number of people waiting to get in or observing the event from the street. Reporting varies dramatically from newspaper to newspaper for the number of people outside before, during, and after the funeral. The Jacksonville Daily Journal in Jacksonville, Mississippi noted that “there were 10,000 mourners outside.” The Monitor of McAllen, Texas reported that 50,000 people viewed the body. “The press coverage of his death was spreading the word and the pictures around the nation, and people everywhere were outraged.” Mamie’s decision to delay the burial by a day may have ultimately allowed upwards of 100,000 people to view Emmett Till’s body in person in Chicago over four days. Lines extended for blocks, south on State Street and around the block at 41st Street, with others not in line, gathering to observe the spectacle and throngs of people.

A brief service was held on Tuesday, September 6th, 1955, the day of the burial, where a group of two hundred would gather inside the church for remarks by Bishop Roberts and Bishop Ford. Mamie Till-Mobley collapsed as she took a look at her son’s remains one last time and asked that the photos within the casket be removed and given to her. Six men were recruited from among the spectators to carry the casket into the hearse, while six of Emmett’s friends served as honorary pallbearers. A line of fifty cars and one hundred policemen followed the hearse to Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, Emmett Till’s final resting place. 

On September 15, 1955, Jet Magazine released a story on the lynching, including an interview with Wheeler Parker. The story also included close-up images of Emmett’s disfigured face, and his body being viewed by Mamie Till-Mobley and her boyfriend, Gene Mobley. Till-Mobley recounts the press coverage in Death of Innocence thusly: “The press coverage of his death was spreading the word and the pictures around the nation, and people everywhere were outraged.” The Jet story increased the circulation of the magazine but also set its historical course for Civil Rights coverage. 

The Till House Interiors

The interior of the Till House has been renovated since the time Emmett and Mamie Till-Mobley occupied the house. However, room layouts have retained the same configuration, and are of the typology of a Chicago two-flat.

The second-floor apartment, where Emmett and Mamie lived, was accessed via a doorway at left through a vestibule providing access to both apartments. A set of stairs rise and then turn to the right, meeting the apartment entrance. The door opens to a central (dining) room, with a larger (living) room at the right, and a kitchen and bathroom to the left. Mamie’s bedroom, at the front of the apartment, was entered via a small room facing St. Lawrence Avenue with a corresponding view of the street. Emmet’s bedroom, towards the rear, left, had a window facing the lot to the north. A skylight illuminating the stairway leading up to the second-floor apartment is contemporaneous to the time that Emmett and Mamie lived in the house, as it is referenced by Ceretta Thomas.

In Death of Innocence, Mamie Till-Mobley provides details of the home on South St. Lawrence she shared with Emmett, including how specific rooms functioned, how the home was decorated, and how domestic tasks were managed between the two of them. In a 1996 interview with Devery S. Anderson, Mamie states that around the time Emmett was killed, She was working for the United States Air Force as a clerk in charge of secret and confidential files. Mamie states that she was the “only one with the combination to the files outside of the officer in charge, which meant I had to go to work-I didn’t fool around. And I would work sometimes six or seven days in a row. I would work from 8 to 13 hours a day, and that meant that Emmett had all the house responsibilities. He told me if I would work, and make the money, he would take care of everything else. He cleaned, and he cooked quite a bit. And he even took over the laundry.”

In the book, Mamie recounts Emmett laying a roll of linoleum in the home, working by himself, and around a built-in china cabinet that could not be moved. Mamie explains, “it had a shape that kind of reflected the bay window along the dining room wall, as if it had been a puzzle piece pulled from that section of the wall. It came out from the corner at an angle, then it ran straight across, then back at an angle to the wall on the other side. That was going to be one tough corner. To make matters worse, right next to the cabinet was a radiator. How on earth were we going to get that linoleum under there?” According to Mamie, Emmett measured the entire piece of linoleum and drew lines around the china cabinet and the radiator, ensuring a perfect fit. Emmett took the additional step of removing the molding in order to install the linoleum underneath, replacing the molding when he was finished. The success of the linoleum installation gave Emmett and Mamie the confidence to then tile the floor of the kitchen, bathroom and hallway. 

Mamie reflects further on the color of the walls in Death of Innocence, “At the time, people were painting their walls navy blue, dark red, dark green. I mean, they were coming up with the craziest colors. And I was following the trend. We used all these colors in the front room and the dining room and the bedroom.

The Future of the Till House

Blacks in Green bought the Till House in 2020, and in 2021 the Chicago City Council designated it a city landmark. Today, Blacks in Green is restoring the house as a museum and theater that will interpret and share the legacies of Emmett and Mamie; while investing in green and renewable energy systems that will serve the house and the neighborhood of West Woodlawn into the 21st century.