Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley was an American educator and activist. She was the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old teenager murdered in Mississippi on August 28, 1955, after accusations that he had whistled at a white grocery store cashier named Carolyn Bryant. For Emmett's funeral in Chicago, Mamie Till insisted that the casket containing his body be left open, because, in her words, "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby."
Till-Mobley during an interview outside the courthouse before Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were acquitted for the murder of her son Emmett Till, September 23, 1955
Emmett Louis Till was an African American teenager who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the acquittal of his killers drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.
Till in a photograph taken by his mother on Christmas Day, 1954
The Chicago two-flat at 6427 S. St. Lawrence Avenue where Emmett Till lived with his mother in mid-1955
The remains of Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in 2009
Bryant's Grocery Mississippi Freedom Trail Marker, 2018
