May 26, 2002

BY DEBRA PICKETT

Forty-seven years ago, the gruesome death of 14-year-old Emmett Till at the hands of Mississippi racists -- for the offense of being black and whistling at a white woman—revolted people across the nation and helped spark the modern civil rights movement.

Two months later, Rosa Parks in Birmingham, Ala., would shake the South by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. She had been thinking, she would say, about Emmett Till.

Till’s funeral in Chicago was attended by tens of thousands of mourners, and he was immortalized by Bob Dylan in a 1963 song. But with the passing years, many Americans, including many Chicagoans, have forgotten—or never learned—the story of Emmett Till.

That soon could change.

A new Emmett Till Museum and memorial chapel are being planned in a south suburban Alsip cemetery, Burr Oak, where Till is buried.

Florida-based Perpetua Corp., which bought Burr Oak last year, told the Chicago Sun-Times that it plans to complete the museum, as well as the memorial chapel and a family mausoleum, by 2005.

The museum also will celebrate the lives of other African-American luminaries buried at Burr Oak, such as singer Dinah Washington and bluesman Willie Dixon. “Since acquiring the property, we’ve learned that it is full of history,” said Marilyn Gates, operations manager at Burr Oak.

Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley Mobley, is scheduled to give the keynote address Monday at the cemetery’s Memorial Day ceremony.

The story of Emmett Till and his mother:

'This is what really started the civil rights movement'

Mamie Till Bradley Mobley lives, as she has for all her adult life, on the South Side of Chicago. Historians call her the mother of the civil rights movement. Everyone in the neighborhood calls her Mrs. Mobley.

It took exactly two phone calls to find her, though I didn't even know her full name. I asked for Emmett Till's mother.

Emmett Till was 14 when he was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 by two white men who thought they had to teach him a lesson after he supposedly whistled at a white woman. I'd first heard of him in a Bob Dylan song.

"THE DEATH OF EMMETT TILL" Many know Emmett Till's story from having heard Bob Dylan's classic 1963 protest song: 'Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago, When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door. This boy's dreadful tragedy I can still remember well, The color of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till. Some men they dragged him to a barn and there they beat him up. They said they had a reason, but I can't remember what. They tortured him and did some evil things too evil to repeat. There was screaming sounds inside the barn, there was laughing sounds out on the street. Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a bloody red rain And they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screaming pain. The reason that they killed him there, and I'm sure it ain't no lie, Was just for the fun of killin' him and to watch him slowly die. And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial, Two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till. But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit this awful crime, And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind. I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see The smiling brothers walkin' down the courthouse stairs. For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free, While Emmett's body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea. If you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust, Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind is filled with dust. Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow, For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low! This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan. But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give, We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live. Copyright 1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

"I'd like to hear your son's story," I tell Mrs. Mobley over the phone. "And yours, too," I say, an afterthought.

Later, I'll remember those words and hate myself for saying them.

I spend an hour in traffic, heading down to meet Mrs. Mobley. Then I drive right past Captain's Hard Times Dining, on East 79th Street, and have to turn around to look more closely for the low-slung diner.

I walk in with some trepidation, nervous about whether this is a wise, or even reasonable, idea. Mrs. Mobley is 80 years old. A widow three times over--and there is no word, of course, for a mother who has lost her only child--her life has not been easy. She's on dialysis and takes two daunting handfuls of medication daily. She doesn't see well. She has difficulty getting around and sometimes gets confused on names and dates and details. I am wondering, in the coarse and self-centered way that reporters do, if she will be a "good" interview.

She recognizes me right away--I'm the only white person here--and gently scolds me for being late.

"This is the reporter," she tells the small crowd that has gathered around her table. They glance politely in my direction and then quickly turn back to her, taking turns saying what an honor it is to meet her.

The restaurant's owner, Josephine Wade, comes out from the kitchen and bows deeply to Mrs. Mobley, declaring how proud she is to host her.

Mrs. Mobley orders the baked chicken with macaroni and cheese and mixed greens. There is corn bread and iced tea--Southern food. She grew up in Mississippi, and though her family migrated north to Argo, Ill., and eventually to Chicago, her life remains forever linked to the backwoods country around the Tallahatchie River. The place she could never fully escape. The place where her son died. Where his killers walked free. Where the locals reviled her as a Northern troublemaker.

"I guess if I would start talking, it would be about the day Emmett left home," she says. She didn't want him to go, but he was eager for an adventure with his Uncle Moses Wright and his favorite cousin, Wheeler Parker. His mother's offer, a driving trip between Detroit and Omaha, even with the promise of a chance to drive her brand new Plymouth, was not nearly as appealing. And there was no way to explain to him the deep sense of foreboding she had about sending her bright, chatty, light-eyed, citified son to small-town Mississippi.

They were late getting to the train station that day, Saturday, Aug. 20, 1955. Emmett, nicknamed Bo, had to run for it.

"I called after him, 'Bo, you didn't kiss me goodbye. How do I know I'll ever see you again?' And he came back to me. He took his watch off and gave it to me to hold while he was gone. Then he tore up the stairs and made that train, by the grace of God."

From that Saturday to the next, she took to her bed, so weak with worry that she couldn't walk. She didn't know what was going on in Mississippi, but, in a way, a mother's way, she did.

On Wednesday of that week--Aug. 24--Emmett Till, his cousins and several of their friends went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market for candy and pop. Something happened inside the tiny country store, though no one knows exactly what. Maybe Till, eager to impress his country cousins, sassed Carolyn Bryant, the white store owner's wife. Or maybe he commented on a bad move made by a man who was playing checkers there.

"Emmett thought he was a slicker when it came to checkers," his mother says.

Or maybe he whistled. That's what the papers said, that 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched because he "wolf-whistled" at a white woman. It's what Mrs. Mobley thinks, too.

"Around age 5, he had a bout with polio," she says, "and after that, he began to stutter. That was a great concern, and we tried everything to help him. Finally, we taught him to whistle to relieve the tension. If he couldn't say a word, he was just supposed to whistle."

In the early-morning hours of Sunday, Aug. 28, Carolyn Bryant's husband, Roy, and his half brother J.W. "Big" Milam came pounding on the door of Moses Wright's cabin. They grabbed Emmett and drove off. It was the last time anyone would see him alive.

Mobley pauses to say grace over her lunch, bowing her head.

She remembers that Saturday night, Aug. 27, how it was that she, like her son, happened to be up late. Her ladies' club, Les Petites Femmes, had gathered in her kitchen, cooking up a storm, trying to distract the 33-year-old widowed mother from worrying for her son. At about 1 a.m., she got out of bed for the first time since Emmett had gone, having resolved that if he wasn't already on the midnight train bound for home, she'd head to Mississippi the next day to bring him back to Chicago herself. She joined her girlfriends in the kitchen and enjoyed their company for a while.

Then something occurred to her. "It was 2 or 2:30 a.m., and I said, 'If Bo Till could get his feet on Chicago soil right now, he'd be one happy cat,' " she remembers. "It was like I'd shot a bullet. Everyone froze."

Three hours later, the phone rang. The call came not from Mississippi, but from Chicago.

"It was Willie Mae, Uncle Moses' oldest daughter. I couldn't understand what she was saying, she was so hysterical," she says. "So I sent my mother to her house."

Her mother soon called back with the news that Bo had been taken.

"I called Gene Mobley," she says, referring to the man she would marry two years later, "and he got to my house so fast it seemed like he had Santa's reindeer. I made my bed, I don't know why, and then I started calling the media. I don't know why I did that, either, because the media, especially the white papers, they didn't pay us much attention. But when we arrived at my mother's house, there were two reporters there."

Mrs. Mobley knew exactly what had happened to her son, and the reporters did, too. Young black boys did not just disappear for a while in the Mississippi woods.

They were lynched.

"And of course we knew who it was--Mr. Bryant. But we didn't yet know his reputation. He was death on black people," she says.

I struggle to keep on taking notes and not lose myself in the thought that what she has just said is literally true, that this man, who lived on scot free until dying of cancer at age 64 and was remembered in a Mississippi newspaper's obituary simply as a "local merchant," was death to her only son. It is nearly impossible for me to grasp that this happened to the elegant and soft-spoken woman--so tiny that her feet don't reach the restaurant floor--sitting across from me, eating her simple lunch.

The restaurant's lunch crowd has thinned out. Tables are empty now, and, for the first time, I can hear music--R & B, mostly--filling in the silences when Mrs. Mobley pauses to take a deep breath or to steal a bite from the meal she'll take home, mostly uneaten.

Three days after Emmett Till was taken from his bed, a fisherman found his battered body in the Tallahatchie River. Mrs. Mobley found out when a reporter called. The reporter didn't want to be the one to tell her. He asked to speak to someone else. Though the house was full of people, she insisted there was no one there to take his message. She knew what he had to say; she'd known all along. She just wanted to hear it.

"He kept insisting," she says. "Was there anyone else he could talk to; did I have a friend? Finally, I gave that to him."

Minutes later, her friend called. "I said, 'Tell me slowly enough that I can write it down.' She told me that he had been found, about the fan [a steel cotton gin fan that was fastened to his neck with barbed wire, presumably to sink his body] and the other details, how his face had been bashed in," she says and then, for the first and only time during our two-hour lunch, she cries.

When she hung up the phone, she read what she had written to the family members who had gathered in her living room. As they screamed and cried, she called the funeral director A.A. Raynor to arrange to bring her son's body back home.

"He said it would cost $3,300. That was all the money in the world. I said, 'Mr. Raynor, regardless of the cost, I want that body back. If I live, I'll pay you. And if I die, someone else will.' "

She looks away for a minute and turns to ask Erline, the home health care worker who has accompanied her to lunch, for her medication.

Mrs. Mobley remembers that a local news report about the discovery of Emmett's body interrupted the "I Love Lucy" show. She got hate mail for that, from irate Chicagoans who didn't think the murder of a young black boy warranted interrupting "I Love Lucy." Mayor Richard J. Daley, who had issued a public appeal for justice in the case, posted two police guards at her home. "And then," she says, "I began to get threats from Mississippi that if I came to Mississippi, not only would they kill me, but they would bomb my house and Mayor Daley's, too."

Emmett's body was returned to Chicago on Friday, Sept. 2.

"I had kind of collapsed," Mrs. Mobley says. "They had me in a wheelchair. When I looked up and saw that box, it overwhelmed me. It was half the size of the freight car. It was the casket and then three boxes, each one inside the other, around it. All four of them had the Mississippi state seal and a padlock on them. That was the only way they'd let them take the body--was to sign a promise not to break those seals."

Mrs. Mobley insisted on opening every one of them. She needed to see her son. What she saw--the extent of his injuries, the sheer savagery they represented--was indescribably horrible. Raynor offered to try to repair the damage somewhat, to make the body more presentable. Then he recommended that they close the casket. But Mrs. Mobley would not have it. She wanted people to know.

They placed clear glass over the open casket. Three thousand people came that first night.

"They'd so torn up the funeral home that we moved him to my mother's church," she says, describing the Roberts Temple of the Church of God in Christ on South State Street. "They kept that church open until Tuesday, when we buried him."

Newspaper reports from the time state that 50 police officers directed traffic and that more than 100,000 people viewed Emmett Till's body. Mrs. Mobley says that it was five or six times that many and that one in five of them needed assistance walking out, the sight of it was so awful.

Two months later, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Birmingham bus. She'd say later, to Mrs. Mobley and others, that she was thinking about Emmett Till that day, about the kind of things that happened to Southern blacks as a matter of course.

"This is what really started the civil rights movement," Mrs. Mobley says, "that's what everyone tells me. But I was not trying to start anything. I was just upset that my only child was gone and so needlessly."

They buried Emmett Till in Burr Oak Cemetery in suburban Alsip, under a simple flat headstone. Last year, a new company bought the cemetery, and they are planning a more suitable memorial. Mrs. Mobley is working with them to design a mausoleum where, eventually, she'll be buried, too.

Two weeks after her son's funeral, Mrs. Mobley traveled to Mississippi to attend Bryant and Milam's trial. Though their guilt was common knowledge, and they would later admit to the crime in a magazine interview, the men were acquitted by an all-white jury that deliberated for an hour and seven minutes. It would have been quicker, but they took a break to get some cold drinks.

"That trial was something you could never imagine," she says. And then she just stops talking.

Having finished her story, Mrs. Mobley asks for her walker. She is exhausted and ready to go home. I follow her outside, where it is threatening to rain, and watch as Erline helps her into her van.

Long after they have driven off, I sit in my car, not ready to put the key in the ignition. When I leave here, I will have to return to the world in which I lived until I came here a couple hours ago, the world that does not know Mrs. Mobley as a heroine, that has largely forgotten her murdered son. Happy as I was there, I don't want to go back.

E-mail: dpickett@suntimes.com

June 2, 2002

In last week's Sunday Sun-Times, reporter Debra Pickett talked with Mamie Till Mobley, the mother of Chicago teenager Emmett Till, who was killed in 1955 by Southern racists for whistling at a white woman. It was a spark of the civil rights movement. Here's what readers had to say.

Terror American style

Thank you for your sensitive and thoughtful article about Emmett Till and his mother. Remembering that event of terrorism still brings back chilling memories.

Although I lived in northern New Jersey at the time, that year I was supposed to visit relatives in Alabama during the summer (I was also 14 years old).

That trip was canceled when one of my family patriarchs ''put his foot down.'' I still remember his comment about me--that ''no [vernacular for Klansman] is going to have him hanging from a tree!''

"The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till'' after the murder, after the burial Emmett's mother is a pretty-faced thing; the tint of pulled taffy. She sits in a red room, drinking black coffee. She kisses her killed boy. And she is sorry. Chaos in windy grays through a red prairie. From Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems Copyright © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks.

As we remember and mourn the victims of 9/11, it would also do us all well to remember the other victims of human atrocities and strive to bring about the fulfillment of the best American ideals. ''We have come a long way but still have a long way to go,'' to paraphrase the words of a popular song from several years ago.

Stan Daniels, Jersey City, N.J.

Jarring a memory

The Emmett Till article took me back to my childhood. I grew up in Chicago and vaguely remember hearing his name many years ago. My father reminded me why I recalled the name Emmett Till.

He worked for the Illinois Central Railroad for many years. On Page 26A, the bottom photo depicts railroad employees positioning the casket into what looks like a hearse. My father (John Kelly, now 77 years old) is the guy on the left, in front, assisting with the casket. My Dad was telling the family over the weekend that select individuals were chosen for this task. He said he will never forget the day because there were so many people on hand who came to see the casket being unloaded off the train. He mentioned too that the circumstances surrounding the death of the child were truly awful, and it is something that has stayed with him all these years.

Kathy Kelly Hillegonds,

Flossmoor

An eye-opener

Thanks for investigating and writing such a profound and significant occurrence. I am a 34-year-old Hispanic (well)-educated in Chicago, and this is the first time I had heard about this historical event. The educational system taught me about Rosa Parks, but not about Emmett Till. I am starting to think it was because people hate to see shameful reflections of themselves and their predecessors.

I had a knot in my throat while reading your article and had to pause several times when summarizing it to my wife. Once again, thanks for the education. I still feel uncertain about my feeling toward this newfound knowledge. I feel a mixture of anger and appreciation now; once things sink in, I'm sure my sensitivity toward African-American struggles will be very much heightened.

Eddy Rojas, Rockford

Story all too familiar

When I first saw that a white person was writing about Emmett Till, I cringed. I cringed when I saw your picture and byline because it is impossible for you to feel about our history the way we do, though it is indeed admirable for you to be curious.

Still, your disconnect shows. You say many Chicagoans have forgotten or never learned of the Emmett Till murder. Which Chicagoans are they? The white ones? I have been here 12 years and have never lived in the city. Yet, at 90 percent of the summer outings I attend, conversations always get to the racism we still face. And at any of those barbecues, bring up Emmett Till and everyone knows the story, just as they know many more like it.

The Emmett Till story is but a straw of racial crimes on the back of our race. Crimes that are in the history of almost every African-American family. Our fathers and grandfathers all know of someone who ''mysteriously'' came up missing from the racist whims of whites. That's why those white murderers could smirk and grin, because what they did was par for the course.

Federal armies beheaded many slave revolt leaders on the spot. I see those men as martyrs--heroes of freedom. My spirit lifts when I read Denmark Vesey's 1822 lecture to a judge who sentenced him to hang for leading a revolt. Nat Turner, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, all deserving honor for standing up to racist oppression. Thousands more. Do you feel that? Like I do?

To many, Emmett Till's savage murder is stand-alone, unfortunate tragedy. To African Americans, it is a martyred name added to the monument of millions who have suffered under the umbrella of American injustice.

Brean DeLowe,

Country Club Hills

Why we left the South

Reading your article about Emmett brought back memories of how my father talked to us about the good and bad of the South. My parents were born and raised in the South, and like most blacks migrated to Chicago and other northern cities in the 1950s. During the 1960s we spent our summers in Mississippi visiting relatives and learning that life was indeed different in the South.

I would tell my elementary school teachers upon my return to school about having to go to the side of the theater and sit in the balcony to watch a movie. Being from the South Side of Chicago and going to the Regal and Met theaters, this was not acceptable to me, but my cousins informed me that we could not go through the front door.

Over the years my father held on to the Chicago Defender newspaper that contained a picture of Emmett's face, and I was scared at first. The paper was quite old and had turned brownish. If you mishandled the paper it would fall to pieces in your hands. I asked, ''What happened to him?'' My father had me read the entire article aloud to him.

He had read this article time and time again, and if I stumbled over a word he would correct me. Each time I saw him with the paper in his hand I knew he was sad, for in death Emmett touched so many lives--especially those who had left the South. The pain of lynching or killing a black had reached the front doors of those who tried to leave the evil behind.

There is a section of 71st Street and Vincennes named after Emmett Till. When I pass the street while driving, I ask my daughter to tell me about Emmett. I want to make sure she doesn't forget about this tragedy.

Rita J. Collins, Blue Island

Villains and heroes

I just got through reading ''Emmett Till honored,'' one of the most horrifying stories of lynching in our history. What really upsets me is being reminded that the men who did this (white men) got off and walked away laughing and carrying on knowing (but not caring) that they took the life of an innocent child.

I thought monsters only existed in movies.

One thing that made me proud was his mother's strength throughout the years. I see her as a heroine in the civil rights movement, right along with Rosa Parks.

You say you were unable to return to this world--a world that doesn't see Mamie Till Bradley Mobley as a heroine. A world that doesn't remember. Well, let me tell you: I do.

David Perry, Forest Park

Update appreciated

Thank you for a touching and sad story about Mrs. Mobley and Emmett Till. I knew the bare bones of what had happened, but I confess that I only think of Emmett briefly when I pass the street honorarily named for him on the South Side. You really showed the human side of his story and made me realize this isn't ancient history.

When I first started reading your story, I was shocked to realize his mother is still alive, because I always thought of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan in the same historical context as the Depression and FDR: way before my time.

Next time I'm in Alsip, I guess I need to make a stop at his grave. What a poor unfortunate victim of people's stupidity and hate.

Tonia Lorenz, Uptown

The hate goes on

Thank you for your story on Emmett Till. When will the savagery and cruelty by ''supposed'' human beings ever stop? I think never. And now as well as the old targets, we have the new ones: the gays, such as Matthew Shepard. Keep writing columns such as yours of May 26. Unfortunately, I think the necessity of them will never leave us.

Audrey Stevens, Lake View

Poems pay tribute

Thanks for the article on Emmett Till. There are some incidents that we should never forget, and this is one of those momentous ones. You mentioned that Till has been immortalized in Bob Dylan's song, but I was surprised that you didn't mention several poems about Till penned by former Illinois poet laureate Gwendolyn Brooks. The Bean Eaters, a collection published circa 1960, includes these poems.

Lena Ampadu,

Department of English,

Towson University,

Towson, Md.

A mother's pain

As I read your interview with Mrs. Mobley, I was once again filled with indescribable sadness, hurt, anger, outrage and disbelief. It seemed like it just happened yesterday. I am a 56-year-old African-American female who was 9 at the time of Emmett Till's lynching. I remember my family and others talking about this horrible ''thing,'' but when Jet magazine arrived at our home and I saw the battered, swollen, hardly recognizable as human remains of Emmett Till lying in a coffin, it was something I cannot and will not forget as long as I live.

I cried again as I read your article. I also realized, for the first time, that Mrs. Mobley knew she would never see her son again when he boarded that train. I could just feel her pain as she agonized over his whereabouts for an entire week. God bless Mamie Till Bradley Mobley, and thank you for once again reminding us of a time of history that should never be forgotten.

Gwen Harmon, Oak Park

A timely reminder

What a magnificently appropriate, beautifully written story. I was a child in Mississippi at the time of Emmett Till's brutal murder. It changed my life. As you note so eloquently, it changed the United States of America.

Thank you for helping Chicago remember Emmett Till. At a time when meanness of spirit and action is on the upswing, we need desperately to remember just how terrible it is when people act on the basis of hate rather than love.

Joanna Adams, co-pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

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