When Curtis Jones, Emmett’s Chicago cousin, saw preparations for burial proceeding, he called his mother in Chicago, who notified Mamie. She was incensed. She had already decided to hold the funeral in Chicago. She called her uncle Crosby Smith in Sumner, who promised “to get Emmett’s body back to Chicago if he had to pack it in ice and drive it back in his truck.”29 He drove to the cemetery with Chester Miller and one of the sympathetic Leflore County deputies. “[The grave diggers] had got the body out to the cemetery and dug the grave,” Smith recalled. “I got there and had the deputy sheriff with me. He told them that whatever I said, went.” Smith told the grave diggers, “?‘No, the body ain’t going in the ground.’ That body went to Chicago.”30
Here was another moment when the Till case could have become just another private bereavement and another mother’s appeal to her church and the local press for justice. Had his body been buried hastily in Mississippi soil, most of the rest would almost certainly not have followed. There would have been a trial and some outrage, but without the Chicago funeral, would the rest of America, let alone the world, have paid attention?
Miller, who had already hauled the corpse from the river to the funeral home in Greenwood and from there to the cemetery in Money, got Smith to help him trundle the coffin back into his hearse and headed back to Greenwood. However, he told Wright, “I don’t dare let that body stay in my establishment overnight.” He considered it very bad luck, to put it mildly, to defy Sheriff Strider. “I wouldn’t have any place in the morning and perhaps wouldn’t be alive by morning.” Wright then telephoned a white undertaker, C. M. Nelson, in Tutwiler, forty miles west of Greenwood, and asked him to pick up the body. Nelson owned two funeral homes: one for blacks and one for whites. A man of considerable wealth, he also served as mayor of Tutwiler.
Nelson agreed to prepare Till’s body under one condition: Wright had to promise that the seal on the casket would never be broken and that no one would ever be allowed to view the body. Wright agreed, making a promise he’d be powerless to keep, but events were moving quickly in a new direction. The badly swollen body prevented intravenous embalming, so to ensure at least minimal preservation Nelson’s embalmer immersed it in a vat of formaldehyde and made incisions to release the tissue gas.31
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