The Blood of Emmett Till(23)

Thanks to Mamie, Chicago’s newspapers, radio, and television were already starting to cover the lynching. A TV news bulletin even interrupted I Love Lucy to report the discovery of the body. Now word spread that Emmett Till’s body was coming home to Chicago. Mamie now envisioned God’s purpose for her life—and for her son’s life: “I took the privacy of my own grief and turned it into a public issue, a political issue, one which set in motion the dynamic force that ultimately led to a generation of social and legal progress for this country.”32 Unlike any of the white newspapers, soon after Till’s lynching the Pittsburgh Courier predicted that his mother’s “agonized cry” might well become “the opening gun in a war on Dixie, which can reverberate around the world.”33 Activists across the country hoped and believed that this tragedy might be the wellspring of positive change. Mamie had ensured that to her mother’s cry would now be added the mute accusation of Emmett’s body.

A colleague wrote to the activist Anne Braden soon after the lynching, “This 14-year-old’s crucifixion is going to strengthen and clarify the cause of de-segregation, human brotherhood, and freedom.”34 It would fall to Mamie Bradley to transform crucifixion into resurrection.





8


MAMA MADE THE EARTH TREMBLE


On Friday, September 2, 1955, Emmett Till’s mother focused much of black Chicago on her son’s murder and the movement it could help unleash. “By the time we reached the train station at Twelfth Street early that Friday morning there was already a huge crowd,” Mamie wrote years later. A thousand people packed the platform. “I had to be brought up in a wheelchair. I was too weak and I just couldn’t stand up at the moment the train pulled in.”1 Reporters and photographers from virtually every Chicago newspaper recorded the scene. The Chicago Defender reported, “Limp with grief and seated in a wheelchair among a huge crowd of spectators, Mrs. Bradley cried out: ‘Lord you gave your only son to remedy a condition, but who knows but what the death of my only son might bring an end to lynching.’?”2 The Chicago Sun-Times described a “hysterical scene” after the train bearing Till’s body arrived: “Mrs. Mamie E. Bradley jumped from her wheelchair Friday when the Illinois Central Railroad’s Panama Limited pulled in. She sprinted across three sets of tracks to the baggage car in which the body lay in a pine box.” Sobbing wildly, she fell to her knees. “My darling, my darling, I would have gone through a world of fire to get you.” With weeping relatives forming a ring around her and the hearse backing into the scene, Mamie yelled again, “My darling, my darling, I know I was on your mind when you died.” As stevedores lifted the pine box into the hearse, the Sun-Times reported, “she said softly: ‘You didn’t die for nothing.’?”3

The uneasiness she had felt about Emmett going to Mississippi, the fear that gripped her when she heard that armed white men had snatched him away, the horror when the worst that could happen became undeniable fact, all began to flow out of her at once. “And I kept screaming, as the cameras kept flashing,” she wrote, “in one long, explosive moment that would be captured for the morning editions.”4

That sentence encapsulates the next several months of her life.

Uncle Crosby Smith, who had accompanied the corpse from Mississippi, stood alongside her on the platform, as did her sweetheart, Gene Mobley, and Rayfield Mooty, now more or less her political advisor. Smith reportedly took Mooty aside and urged him, “Don’t let nobody see that box, don’t even let them open the box. Be sure don’t let Mamie see what’s in there.”5 Mooty stayed close at hand, as did Bishop Louis Henry Ford and Bishop Isaiah Roberts, who pushed her wheelchair and prayed with her. The sight of the stevedores hefting that huge pine box and rolling it toward a waiting hearse made her stand up and then fall to her knees. The two ministers laid firm hands on her shoulders. “Lord, take my soul, show me what you want me to do,” she cried, “and make me able to do it.”6

Mamie was far from the first American mother to cry bitter tears over a child lynched in Mississippi. On October 12, 1942, according to an NAACP investigatory report, two fourteen-year-old black boys, Charlie Lang and Ernest Green, were seen by a passing motorist playing with a white girl near a bridge and charged with attempted rape. A mob seized them from the jail in Quitman, cut off the boys’ penises, and pulled chunks of flesh from their bodies with pliers. One of the boys had a screwdriver shoved down his throat until it protruded from his neck. The mob then hanged the boys from the bridge, a traditional lynching site in Clarke County. A photograph of their bodies taken surreptitiously was released by national wire services, but only one white newspaper, PM, printed it, though a number of African American papers did. The New York Times reported the lynchings without the photograph in a one-column story on page 25.7

Only weeks before the Till lynching, terrorists had assassinated Reverend George Lee and Lamar Smith for their efforts to register black voters. The national press and the federal government ignored the murders, seeming to accept that this kind of behavior was a fact of life in the Magnolia State and a matter of little concern outside activist circles in the rest of America. “Emmett Till was, you know, that sort of a strange phenomenon,” Clarksdale NAACP leader Aaron Henry told an interviewer in 1981. “White folks have been killing black boys all of my life, throwing them in rivers, burying them, and all that shit. Just why the Emmett Till murder captured the conscience of the nation, I don’t know. It could have been that it was the beginning of television and people could see things. The fact that a black boy was killed by white men wasn’t nothing unusual.”8