Mamie Till

Things like that.

Then you have their mothers, right? Mother, Mammy Till Mobley, Yeah, Mamie Till Mobley.

I think I said Mobsley.

It's Mobley who wanted to make her son's death nationally recognized so people could see what happened to her son.

And, you know, it really...

It's really, you know, it was painful to feel the horror that, say, Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till, felt when, you know, she knew her child was going to the South.

This is before he was lynched.

But knowing that your kid is going to an area where they do not like black life.

And I'm not sure we would be talking about, I'm not sure civil rights would have gone the way it did had we not seen it.

And Mamie Till knew what she was doing.

She was like, if I don't show them what I did to my boy, then bigotry is just a concept.

She says something like, let them see what they've done.

Let them see what they've

done, because otherwise it becomes a concept.

And as much as we may not want to hear it, until school shootings get to Mamie Till, we're going to have them.

Mm-hmm.

One of the reasons for the urgency of this project is to remind us all that there are many tills, right? There are many Emmett tills.

Mamie Till Mobley had the prophetic wisdom to understand that witnessing was going to be foundational for the extended civil rights movement.

When she said, let the world see what they've done to my son, then she forced open the casket to show his mutilated, abused, tortured body.

She opened our eyes.

Following the murder, Emmett Till's body was shipped back to his family in Chicago.

His mother, Mamie Till, while emotionally distraught, made a decision that would reverberate throughout history.

She decided that her son should have an open casket funeral.

As she put it, Emmett's body was on display for five days Roberts Temple Church of God.

Tens of thousands of people came to pay their respects and to see in person the evidence of the violence inflicted on this child.

But what made the name Emmett Till iconic was a powerful and devastating photograph that was taken by David Jackson, which captured Mamie Till gazing down at her son's ravaged and deformed body.

The image is haunting, and what these men had done to Emmett's face was horrifying.

The photo, along with others, were published in Jet Magazine, and the images of Till's deformed face, alongside images of him before his death, smiling and looking like the child that he was, forced people to confront the terror that Black people in the South had been subjected to for a century.

In August 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi.

His mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted that the world confront what racial terror had done to her child.

The photographs of Emmett Till's mutilated little body became part of the moral archive of the movement.

History sometimes turns on a law.

And the sacrifice really lives at the choices of his mother.

and the choices Mamie Till Mobley made to open his cassette, to broadcast those pictures, to continue to speak his name.

And I think this exhibit brings together a ton of unique Chicago artists featuring original essays, photography, floral work.

We are going to drop links in our show notes for all of these.

Nolan's mother, still grieving the death of her son, she gotta go and defend her credentials 'cause white folks are mad that she's demanding justice for her, for her son.

This sounds just like Mamie Till, uh, Mobley, Emmett Till's mother.

They did the same thing to Emmett Till, Art.

After they assassinated Emmett Till, they harassed his mother.