Mamie was far from the first American mother to cry bitter tears over a child lynched in Mississippi. On October 12, 1942, according to an NAACP investigatory report, two fourteen-year-old black boys, Charlie Lang and Ernest Green, were seen by a passing motorist playing with a white girl near a bridge and charged with attempted rape. A mob seized them from the jail in Quitman, cut off the boys’ penises, and pulled chunks of flesh from their bodies with pliers. One of the boys had a screwdriver shoved down his throat until it protruded from his neck. The mob then hanged the boys from the bridge, a traditional lynching site in Clarke County. A photograph of their bodies taken surreptitiously was released by national wire services, but only one white newspaper, PM, printed it, though a number of African American papers did. The New York Times reported the lynchings without the photograph in a one-column story on page 25.7
Only weeks before the Till lynching, terrorists had assassinated Reverend George Lee and Lamar Smith for their efforts to register black voters. The national press and the federal government ignored the murders, seeming to accept that this kind of behavior was a fact of life in the Magnolia State and a matter of little concern outside activist circles in the rest of America. “Emmett Till was, you know, that sort of a strange phenomenon,” Clarksdale NAACP leader Aaron Henry told an interviewer in 1981. “White folks have been killing black boys all of my life, throwing them in rivers, burying them, and all that shit. Just why the Emmett Till murder captured the conscience of the nation, I don’t know. It could have been that it was the beginning of television and people could see things. The fact that a black boy was killed by white men wasn’t nothing unusual.”8
Emmett’s murder would never have become a watershed historical moment without Mamie finding the strength to make her private grief a public matter. Today was the day he should have bounded from the train with stories of the Delta to tell, eager to know if she’d gotten his bicycle fixed, ready to take to the sandlots and dream he was Don Newcombe pitching Brooklyn into the World Series. He should have bounced into the house eager to see his dog, Mike, rescued from the pound. He was supposed to start school in a few days, and finish painting the garage door.9 But now his mother’s errands included finding a way to bury her own heart, finding a way to go forward without a reason to do so, and giving her only son back to God. She would do all that, and she would leverage the only influence America’s racial caste system granted her: public grief and moral outrage sufficient to shame and anger some fraction of the nation.
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Rayfield Mooty claimed that he urged Mamie to open the casket and keep it open.10 But the choice to display the ruined body of her son was Mamie’s alone to make, and there is no reason to doubt that she made it deliberately. Even before they left the train station, the funeral director A. A. Rayner, who had arranged for the hearse that would carry Emmett’s body to the South Side funeral home, had clashed with Mamie over her determination to open that box. Rayner had agreed not to open it before the coffin even left Mississippi; she insisted that he do just that.
In the time-honored way of undertakers, Rayner remained serene. He had served the South Side for years and knew that many funerals generated brief squalls about what was proper and best. Grief set people on edge; the funeral director’s job was to absorb the tension calmly and yet make sure that things were done right—in this instance, that the box stay shut. “He was very patient with me,” Mamie recalled. “He set it all out for me. It was being sent locked up with the seal of the State of Mississippi.”
“Mrs. Bradley,” he explained, “I had to sign papers, the undertaker had to sign papers, your relatives had to sign papers.” A number of promises had been necessary to get the casket out of Mississippi, the main one being that it would never be opened. No one needed to see what was in that box anyway, he told her.
“I told him that if I had to take a hammer and open that box myself, it was going to be opened,” she wrote. “You see, I didn’t sign any papers, and I dare them to sue me. Let them come to Chicago and sue me.” Finally Rayner relented.11 Before leaving the train station either Mamie or one of her companions told Simeon Booker, a reporter for Jet magazine, they were going to A. A. Rayner & Sons, and Booker instructed a photographer to follow him there. “Mrs. Till didn’t have anybody else in the press she knew,” he recounted.12
As they neared the funeral home at 41st Street and Cottage Grove, Mamie and her entourage could already detect a ghastly odor. Inside the staff set off spray canisters of deodorizer to cover the smell, though the attempt was unsuccessful. Rayner showed them to a waiting room so his staff could have a little more time to prepare the body, but Mamie demanded to see her son’s body as it was. Reluctantly Rayner led Mamie, her father, and Gene Mobley to the room where Emmett’s corpse lay on a slab for embalming. “He really didn’t think that I should look at Emmett like this,” she recalled. “But I had kept insisting.”13
Her two companions steadied her on either side. “At first glance,” she wrote, “the body didn’t even appear human.” But she recoiled in horror from the realization that “this body had once been my son.” She held herself closely in check, trying hard to “steel [herself] like a forensic doctor. I had a job to do.” She began with the feet, noting the familiar ankles, legs, and the knees so much like her own. There were no noticeable scars on the body, but the huge tongue seemed choked from his mouth. His right eyeball rested on his cheek, hanging by the optic nerve, and the left eye was gone altogether. The bridge of his nose seemed to have been chopped with a meat cleaver, and the top of his head was split from ear to ear. A bullet hole just behind his temple showed daylight from each side. The vision was ghastly, but she had done her duty: it was Emmett’s body.
“That’s Bobo,” Gene Mobley, the barber, said. “I know that haircut.”
Mamie’s last thoughts as she turned away were how her boy must have felt that night when he realized that he was going to die. She knew in her heart that he must have called out her name.14
At the funeral home, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, Mamie made up her mind to have an open-casket funeral, exclaiming, “Let the people see what they did to my boy.” She dispatched Mooty to talk with her minister about using the church. Mooty recalled telling the man, “All we want is to have a place to lay that body where it can be seen, that’s all. This may not stop [lynching] but this will be starting an end to all that lynching that’s been going on down in Mississippi. They’ve been throwing everything in the river until it be full. Now you got a chance to be a great man if you let us use that church.” Whatever convinced the preacher, the church doors opened for the viewing of the body that very night.15