The Blood of Emmett Till(67)

Mamie Bradley well knew that being the mother of Emmett Till made her uniquely useful to and powerful in the struggle. The demands on her were constant and increasingly begged trade-offs. Despite rumors that she had collapsed from exhaustion in Chicago on October 1, she walked into Williams Institutional CME Church in New York City on that same day, only a week after her last appearance there. Three thousand people had been waiting in the sanctuary, some of them for hours. The Chicago Defender estimated at least fifteen thousand more huddled outside, listening on loudspeakers. The throng applauded, cheered, and wept at the sight of Emmett Till’s mother. A. Philip Randolph was the first to speak. “If America can send troops to Korea . . . ,” he began, and the crowd drowned him out with its roar. In Cold War fashion, the New York branch of the NAACP had urged Mamie not to participate in this rally because of its alleged “pinkish tinge,” or leftist sympathies, but to return instead for its own mass meeting the following Sunday. She rejected the counsel. She resented not only what the Chicago Defender called the “petty jealousy” and “unnecessary confusion” among the various civil rights organizers but also the huge sums being raised on her courage and her son’s death while her own financial needs grew dire; she had been unable to work since being swept up by the movement.18

Of these concerns internal to the movement the wider world knew little and cared less. On Sunday, October 2, tens of thousands again gathered in Detroit, New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and a number of other cities to protest the Till verdict and call for federal action. Three thousand packed Chicago’s Metropolitan Church and perhaps seven thousand more spilled into the street in what some said was the largest and most energetic civil rights meeting in the history of the Chicago NAACP. Willoughby Abner spoke on historic Mississippi atrocities and racial conflict in Chicago. Simeon Booker told stories of covering the trial in Sumner. Frank Brown, who had attended the trial for the UPWA, and Charles Hayes, the union’s District 1 director, each held forth on the ties between civil rights and labor issues.19 This was also the topic in Minneapolis, where the AFL demanded that the federal government act in the Till case, and at the New York convention of the International Association of Machinists, AFL, where Herbert Hill, the national NAACP labor secretary, told three hundred delegates that trade unions were imperiled “because the South remains a land of trigger-happy sheriffs and lynch mobs using violence not only against innocent Negroes but also against union organizers.”20

The national office of the NAACP, flush with funds donated at dozens of mass meetings, scheduled rallies across the North and South in the weeks ahead, many featuring Mamie Bradley. In Alabama, it was Birmingham, Montgomery, and Tuskegee; in Georgia, Atlanta and Savannah had large protests. Both Charleston, South Carolina, and Charleston, West Virginia, were on the schedule, as were Miami and Tampa, Dallas and Fort Worth, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Boston and Springfield, Toledo and Cincinnati, Camden and New Brunswick. The Memphis, Nashville, Chattanooga, and Knoxville NAACP branches prepared to host rallies, as did those in St. Louis, East St. Louis, and Kansas City. Milwaukee, Des Moines, and Washington, D.C., rounded out the tour. Whether Mamie would bear up under the pace of this schedule remained to be seen.21

For the rest of October and in November protests continued from New York to Los Angeles. Moses Wright spoke from time to time, walking back and forth, pounding his fist into his palm, and animating his performances in the manner of a veteran Church of God in Christ preacher. “Rally of 20,000 here cheers call for action against Mississippi goods,” the New York Times reported on October 12. Jammed into the Garment District on 36th Street between Seventh and Eighth, the twenty thousand protestors roared their approval when Adam Clayton Powell Jr. proposed a national boycott on Mississippi products and a March on Washington in January to demand that Congress finally pass an antilynching bill. Activists quickly organized March on Washington Committees in New York, Detroit, Chicago, and elsewhere.22

Throughout the fall and into the winter, mass meetings flourished in New York, Chicago, and Detroit, as well as Newark, Boston, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Milwaukee.23 In Los Angeles some five thousand persons crowded into the Second Baptist Church, with several thousand more standing outside, to protest the Till case. Almost certainly a majority of them were first-or second-generation Southern transplants of the Great Migration. As described by the Chicago Defender, “The meeting was punctuated by screams and occasional outcries as Dr. T. R. M. Howard of Mississippi related facts and details about what he termed the ‘cruel, desperate and deadly’ treatment of Negroes in his home state.” Silence ruled when the eloquent physician turned his eye to Los Angeles itself. “How many of you within my sight and the sound of my voice are enjoying the luxury of Cadillacs, safe, comfortable homes, and the privilege to vote, while thousands of your brothers in blood live in fear of their lives?” he demanded. The rally raised roughly $10,000.24

In mid-November the NAACP disclosed that more than a quarter million people had heard Mamie Bradley or Moses Wright speak at their rallies, and Howard claimed that he had addressed thirty thousand people.25 When Medgar Evers reported on his out-of-state speeches on the Till case, he listed Detroit twice, St. Louis, East St. Louis, Washington, D.C., Tampa, and Nashville.26 Both Howard and Adam Clayton Powell spoke in Montgomery in November. There would be many more speeches in a movement organized by indignation over the Till case.

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