A combined total of well over 100,000 attended rallies that day in Chicago, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, New Rochelle, Newark, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and many other cities and towns across the country.12
This was not the cramped, fearful McCarthy era, nor did it reflect what one Democrat called the Eisenhower administration’s languid gaze “down the green fairways of indifference.”13 Something new was afoot. In cities all across America citizens found Mississippi guilty as charged. The response was a gathering of activists in the North—labor unionists, religious progressives, stalwarts of the Old Left, and ordinary citizens—that would join activists in the South to transform the Southern civil rights movement into a national coalition. The quickly emerging movement was so large that no one person or organization could manage it. Not since the Scottsboro trials of the 1930s had the country seen anything like it.14 The killing of that boy who “did the talking” had become much more than just another lynching in the South. For some, including Mamie Bradley, it was an Archimedean lever with which to move the world.
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After September 25 churches, labor unions, NAACP branches, and other organizations gathered strength for a second wave of protests the following week. The largest church in Detroit, Greater King Solomon Baptist Church at 14th and Marquette, held a twenty-four-hour service on September 29 to motivate support for rallies on October 1 and 2.15 Twelve pastors and Mamie Bradley addressed the four thousand gathered there. “Mrs. Bradley said she had recovered from the sorrow she felt at her son’s death,” reported the Chicago Tribune, “and ‘Now I’m angry—just plain angry.’ She urged a united front in the fight for civil rights.”16 The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the Urban League, the United Steelworkers, the UPWA, and the NAACP organized mobilization meetings in Chicago, New York, Milwaukee, and Buffalo, and across the country built momentum for the massive national protests. When the day came, the headline in the Chicago Defender proclaimed, “100,000 Across Nation Protest Till Lynching.”17
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