The Blood of Emmett Till(25)

Rayner took the liberty of slightly preparing the body anyway. He stitched the mouth closed to cover the ghastly tongue, removed the dangling eye, and closed both sets of eyelids. On the left side of the head, where the beating had been most severe, he sewed the pieces of the skull back together as best he could. The body remained a horrifying sight. Mamie remained gracious about this slight subversion of her will: “I told Mr. Rayner he had done a beautiful job.”16 Inside the coffin Rayner laid the body in a glass-covered, airtight box that successfully contained the horrific odor.

That evening, at the first public viewing, many thousands stood in long lines around the block to pay their respects and see Emmett Till’s mangled body; the Chicago Defender reported “more than 50,000,” though estimates varied.17

Minnie White Watson, an archivist at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, believed that her friend Medgar Evers, the state NAACP field secretary, was instrumental in “talking Mrs. Till into having . . . [an] open casket funeral” for her son. Mamie later acknowledged that she was “grateful for his commitment and his compassion. He had really been moved by Emmett’s murder. He was the one who had done the initial investigation to brief the NAACP head office.”18 Evers and his allies in Mississippi had displayed George Lee’s disfigured face in an open casket to great effect. Though Mamie’s memoir does not exclude the possibility of Evers’s influence, it eloquently describes how she came to the decision:

I knew that I could talk for the rest of my life about what happened to my baby, I could explain it in great detail, I could describe what I saw laid out there on that slab at A. A. Rayner’s place, one piece, one inch, one body part at a time. I could do all of that and people would still not get the full impact. . . . They had to see what I had seen. The whole nation had to bear witness to this. I knew that if they walked by that casket, if people opened the pages of Jet magazine or the Chicago Defender, if other people could see it with their own eyes, then together we would find a way to express what we had seen.19

Mamie and Ray Mooty continued to work the phones and keep the case before the Chicago media. Had they not done so it would be difficult to explain the Chicago Tribune’s report the following day, September 3: “More than 40,000 persons viewed the body in the afternoon and night.” The line stretched around the block and beyond throughout the day and into the evening. So many people became overwhelmed by emotion at the sight of the body that the funeral home had to set up a special section of chairs outside where they could sit and recuperate. Ushers and women in white stood ready to catch those who fainted.20

Mourners and curiosity seekers clogged 40th and State Streets waiting to file in to see the battered body of their hometown boy. Many hailed from Mississippi and had escaped the violence of Jim Crow, which seemed to fall upon them now in Chicago. Thousands must have sent their children south in the summer to visit grandparents and cousins, dispensing the same lecture about the ways of white folks that Mamie had given Emmett. It could easily have been their child unspeakably slaughtered and sent home in a pine box. This realization inspired rage more than fear, because there on the South Side, surrounded by tens of thousands of African Americans, with a foothold, however tenuous, in the city’s politics and media, they knew one thing for certain: they did not need to hide their anger anymore.21

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When Mamie and her family arrived for the funeral service on Tuesday, escorted through the throng by half a dozen police officers, the barrel-vaulted sanctuary of Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ was full to its capacity of 1,500, and thousands more stood outside, where loudspeakers had been set up so people could hear what was happening in the church. Bishop Ford offered an emotional sermon based on the fiery text of Matthew 18:6. “But [whosoever] shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”22 Reverend Cornelius Adams asked the crowd to offer “fighting dollars” to help the struggle for racial justice; $700 was immediately taken up for legal aid.23 Throughout the viewing and the funeral ushers collected money for the NAACP and Emmett’s family, a process that would continue in the weeks and months ahead.

“I had no idea how I could make it through,” Mamie recalled. “But I knew that I had to do it. And I knew that it wasn’t going to get any easier as we prepared for what was ahead.”24 Now that she had the world’s attention, she had to decide what to do with it. As she looked into the glass-enclosed coffin, she knew that a political and spiritual struggle lay ahead to make her son’s death meaningful in ways that his life hadn’t had time to be. In the face of this burden she began to lose her grip. The Chicago Tribune reported that she “collapsed and had to be assisted to a seat after she looked for the last time at her son’s body.”25

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With fifty thousand coming on Friday night and forty thousand more on Saturday, followed by three more days of crowds lined up to view Emmett’s body, it is hard to say how many people became witnesses in this way. The Chicago Tribune reported, “Capt. Albert Anderson, in charge of a large police detail at the church, said that more than 100,000 persons had viewed the remains of the youth.” The Chicago Defender’s estimate was more than twice that number, 250,000: “All were shocked, some horrified and appalled. Many prayed, scores fainted, and practically all, men, women and children, wept.”26