August 28, 2017 • 37 mins
The reason Emmett Till's murder played such a consequential role in the Civil Rights movement is because of choices of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. For more than 45 years after his murder, she continually worked to make sure he did not die in vain.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to STUFH you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. For the
most part, until the ninety nineties or so, a lot
of times timelines of the civil rights movement in the
(00:22):
United States marked its beginning as either brown versus Board
on May seventeenth of nineteen fifty four, or with Rosa
Parks refusal to give up her bus seat on December one.
And it's definitely true that movements usually have multiple beginning parts.
A lot of times people will note like one keystone moment,
(00:45):
but usually there are a lot of things that happened.
But these uh timelines from a couple of decades ago
often didn't really pay a lot of attention to another
event that happened in between those two, which was the
August nineteen five five murder of fourteen year old Emmett Till.
But then a couple of books came out that started
(01:06):
to change all of that. One was a Death in
the Delta, The Story of Emmett Till by Stephen J. Whitfield,
which came out in Night, and the other was Emmett
Till The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement, which
was based on Cleonora Hudson Weems doctoral dissertation UM and
that second but came out in nineteen nine four. So,
along with other writings, these two books really started to
(01:30):
bring renewed public attention to the murder into the role
that it played as a really powerful catalyst in the
civil rights movement. Multiple other books have followed, and then
includes some that were published as recently as fifteen and
twenty seventeen, which is the year that we're recording this episode.
But the reason that Emmett Till's murder played such a
(01:51):
consequential role in the civil rights movement is really the
choices that his mother made me Till mobily made. She
faced the death of her child with extraordinary bravery and
clarity and grace, and for more than forty five years
after his murder, she continually worked to make sure that
he didn't die in vain. So she is who we
are going to talk about today, and maybe Elizabeth Carthon
(02:14):
was born on November twenty three in Webb, Mississippi. When
she was about two years old, her family moved to Argo, Illinois,
which is outside of Chicago during the Great Migration, and
her father, wily Nash Carthon, had gotten a job at
Argo Corn Products resigning company, and today Argo is actually
known as Summit. Mamie's father left when she was about eleven,
(02:39):
but even before that point she was really closest to
her mother, Alma. Her upbringing was strict and disciplined and religious,
and her mother helped found the Argo Temple, Church of
God in Christ. Alma pushed Mamie to do well in
school while also sheltering her from worldlier things. So in
her memoir, Maymie tell Mobili would go on to describe
(03:00):
herself as naive and trusting and really having a lot
to catch up on once she was a wife and mother.
Herself and their neighborhood in Argo was predominantly black, but
the high school, Argo Community High School was predominantly white.
Maymie became the first black student to make the schools
a honor role and the fourth black student to graduate,
and when she graduated, she was first in her class.
(03:24):
She married Louis Till on October fourteenth of nineteen forty,
when both of them were eighteen, and on July one,
they had a son, Emmett Louis Till, who Maybe named
after his father and her favorite uncle. But even before
Emmett was born, a family friend had taken to calling
him the little Bobo, and so his family and his
(03:44):
friends generally called him Bobo or Bo for the rest
of his life. Mamie's relationship with Emmett's father didn't last long.
While Emmett was still a baby, Louis assaulted Maymie one night,
and she defended herself with a pot of hot water. Eventually,
she got a restraining order and moved back in with
her mother, working as a clerk typist while Alma looked
(04:05):
after Emmett. And after Louis repeatedly broke the restraining order,
they wound up in court where the judge gave him
the option of the military or jail, and he chose
the former. Maybe didn't hear from Louis for several months
after that, but when she did, he let her know
that he had made arrangements for her to receive part
of his military pay. But on July thirteenth of nineteen
(04:27):
forty five, Maybe got a telegram that Louis had been
killed in Italy. We'll go into a little more detail
about this later in the episode, but for the rest
of Emmett's life, the only information that Maybe had was
that his father had died due to quote willful misconduct,
and that for that reason they wouldn't receive survivor benefits.
Emmett was just about to turn four when his father died,
(04:50):
and the only one of Louis's possessions that made me
received from the army after his death was a signet
ring engraved with his initials, which she passed on to
her son. Emmett grew into a funny, fearless boy who
liked to crack jokes and dress well, and when he
was about five, he contracted polio. He had to be
quarantined at home for about a month after he recovered.
(05:13):
The only lingering effect was that he spoke often with
a stutter, and that was especially when he was nervous
or excited. During Emmett's youngest years, Alma raised him while
Mamie worked, and Maybe would go on to describe her
relationship with her son really is very sibling like. Although
Mamie was working to support the family, Alma was really
the one running it, and in many ways she acted
(05:35):
as mother for both her daughter and her grandson. But
eventually Emma moved to Chicago and Mamie stayed behind in
Argo with Emmett, along with a network of cousins and
other family members who had moved to Illinois from Mississippi.
This extended family was large and they were all really
close to each other. Various members would take trips back
(05:56):
and forth between the two states to visit one another.
He eventually, Mamie decided to move to Detroit to try
to reconnect with her father, who she hadn't had much
contact with it all since she was young, and there
she met Pink Bradley and they got married on May
five of nineteen fifty one. Emmett wasn't very happy in Detroit, though,
(06:17):
and he begged his mother to be allowed to go
back to Chicago to live with his grandmother. Maymie eventually agreed,
but things really just weren't working out for her in
Detroit either. She was working long hours while also trying
to go back and forth to Chicago to visit Emmett
and her mother. So finally, after Almas sold her old
house in Argo and bought a two unit building in Chicago,
(06:40):
maybe Pink and Emmett moved into one of those two units,
but not long after they moved in, Maymie discovered that
Pink was seeing another woman, so she threw him out
and divorced him. By the time he was eleven, Emmett
Till had grown into an energetic and industrious boy with
a bit of a mischievous streak. After Mamie's divorced from
Pink Bradley, he became fiercely protective of his mother, and
(07:03):
he also took on a lot of responsibilities at home.
Maybe worked all day first for the Social Security Administration
and then for the Air Force, so Emmett did a
lot of the cooking and took care of the house.
And it wasn't just cooking and cleaning. When Maybe bought
linoleum for the kitchen floor and then bad weather kept
the people who were supposed to help install it from
(07:23):
being able to come, Emmett worked out how to do
it himself, which led to the two of them tackling
a whole range of home improvement projects together. He was
also fond of working to make a little extra money,
doing things like running errands and delivering groceries. Maybe met
Gene Mobley one day when she went to get her
nails done. Jean was working at Ford Motor Company during
(07:45):
the day and he was working as a barber at night.
He seemed interested in her immediately, but she didn't really
think he was her type, and she was understandably reluctant
to start another relationship. But that started to change when
she saw how good he was with Emmett and the
summer of nineteen fifty five, Emmett wanted to go visit
his family in Mississippi, and we're going to take a
(08:06):
quick sponsor break before we talk about that. In the
summer of nineteen fifty five, Maybe began planning a vacation,
planned a road trip with Jeane and Emmett. First they
would go to Detroit and then to Omaha. But Emmett
really had a different idea. Mamie's uncle mos Right, who
(08:30):
was a preacher and sharecropper who lived outside of money Mississippi,
had come up to Chicago for a funeral, and when
he went back home, he was going to take Emmett's
cousin and close friend, Wheeler Parker with him for a visit.
Another Chicago cousin, Curtis Jones, was going to join them
in Mississippi. As well. This sounded like a tremendous adventure.
(08:50):
It was, in Mamie's words, as close to summer camp
as Emmett was going to get and Emmett was set ongoing.
And this idea, though made Mamie incredibly nervous, she did
finally agree to it. Before Emmett left, his mother had
a talk with him, As she framed it in her
memoir quote the talk every black parent had with every
child sent down South back then, it was a talk
(09:12):
about what white society expected of black people in the
Deep South. She told him to speak only when spoken to,
and to say yes ma'am and no ma'am, and yes
or and no sir. And if he saw a white
woman walking down the sidewalk, he was to step off
the sidewalk and lower his head and wait until she
had passed to get back on it again, without ever
looking directly at her or making eye contact. Mamie hoped
(09:35):
that this talk that she had with him, and the
fact that he would be in the care of family
who actually lived in Mississippi and knew all these unwritten
rules intuitively would keep him safe while he was there.
He left on August twenty nine. They were running late
that morning, and when they got to the train station,
he ran up to the platform without kissing Mami goodbye.
(09:57):
She called him back and he gave her a kiss
and his watch, saying he wasn't going to need it
while he was gone, and she asked if he also
wanted her to hang on to his father's ring, which
he was wearing, and he said that he wanted to
show it off to his cousin's. Maybe had intended to
go ahead and take the vacation she'd been planning, but
she couldn't motivate herself to get ready for it. She
(10:18):
just missed Emmett terribly, and even though they'd been separated before,
this was different. She was worried sick about him, and
since the Rights didn't have a phone, it wasn't easy
for her to check on him. The only way she
could talk to him was if she called one of
the Rights neighbors who did have a phone and see
if they could find him. Maybe got a letter from
Emment on August enclosed with a note from her aunt
(10:40):
Lizzie Wright saying what a nice voice she had raised.
Emmett's letter asked if she could please get his bike
fixed before he got home. That night, Mamie hosted a
meeting for her Ladies Club, which was her first real
social interaction since Emmett had gone to Mississippi. Having people
around felt like a welcome relief, and everybody stayed up
so late talk gang and visiting that she made an
(11:01):
early breakfast before people left, and then went to bed
to try to get some sleep before church. Then about
nine thirty in the morning on August Maymie got a
call from her cousin, Willie May Jones that was Curtis's mother,
and Willie May told Mamie that some white men had
come and taken Emmett away from the Rights home in
(11:21):
the middle of the night. Here's what had happened. On August.
Emmett and his cousins had driven in some money Mississippi
to buy some gum and candy at Bryant's grocery store.
There are a lot of conflicting reports about exactly what
happened while they were there. Caroline Bryant, the proprietor's wife,
claimed that he had physically grabbed her, threatened her, and
(11:44):
made lewd comments to her while he was in the store.
In the book The Blood of Emmett's Hell was published,
in which she admitted that all of that was false. Witnesses,
including some of Emmett's cousins, said that at some point
Emmett whistled at Caroline. His cousins theorized that it might
have been to try to impress them or make them laugh,
(12:05):
and his mother theorized that he had whistled because he
was stuttering. That was a trick that he had learned
that could help him get his words out when he
was having trouble. Regardless, and its cousins weren't impressed or amused,
they were scared. They all piled back into the car
and drove away as quickly as possible, even at one
point abandoning the car to cut through the fields and hide.
(12:26):
They talked among themselves about whether they should send Emmett
back to Chicago, but a couple of days later, when
nothing bad had happened, they forgot about it. But then
at about two thirty am on August, Caroline Bryant's husband,
Roy and his brother in law J. W. Milum showed
up at the right home asking for the boy from Chicago,
(12:46):
the one who had quote done all that talk. Mose
and Lizzie Wright. Both tried to reason with them and
even offered them money to just leave Emmett alone, but
the two men, who were armed, refused, so that was
all that they only knew at that point. After she
got the call from William ay Jones, Mamie called Jean.
They went together to her mother's house to tell her
(13:07):
what had happened and to wait for news of Emmett.
Both women were distraught, especially since they couldn't reach the
rights for an update. Soon Maymie started calling newspapers, and
when reporters arrived, she told them that white men had
come into her uncle's home and money Mississippi and kidnapped
her son. On Monday morning, Augustin ray Field Moody, the
(13:28):
nephew of Alma's husband, connected Mamie to the Chicago office
of the N Double A c P. The N Double
A CP referred her to William Henry Huff, chairman of
the Legal Redress Committee. The two men began putting Mamie
in touch with people and resources in both Mississippi and Illinois.
Soon Illinois Governor William Stratton, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley,
(13:51):
and Congressman William Dawson were involved in the search for Emmon.
They were making and receiving so many calls that the
family added a second phone line. That same day, Roy
Bryant and J. W. Milem were arrested for kidnapping Emmett Till,
something they both admitted that they had done in Chicago.
The family kept waiting, making calls and sending money to
(14:13):
Mississippi to help with the search, and then on Wednesday,
August thirty one, they got the news a fisherman had
found Emmett's body in the Tallahatchee River. He had been
badly beaten and probably shot, and his body had been
weighed down with the fan of a cotton gin tied
to his neck with barbed wire. His body was so
(14:33):
badly disfigured that they were only able to identify him
by his father's ring, which he was still wearing. And
Mississippi tallahatche County Sheriff HC. Strider called in a black
undertaker and told him to bury the body immediately, and
it's cousin Curtis, called home to make sure Mamie knew
what was happening. Mamie, of course, did not want her
(14:54):
son to be buried in Mississippi. She and others started
making calls adamant that Emmett's body be returned to Chicago,
and they eventually contacted A. A. Rayner, a black funeral
director in Chicago who took over the arrangements, and he
eventually let Mamie know that they could bring the body back,
but that it would cost three thousand, three hundred dollars.
(15:14):
That was nearly Mamie's annual salary, but she agreed. Demanding
that Emmett's body be brought back to Chicago and not
buried in Mississippi was the first of several actions that
Mamie would take that would propel her son's death into
the international spotlight and then go on to spark a
ground swell of civil rights activism. So we're gonna talk
(15:36):
about that more. After another quick sponsor break, Emmett Till's
body arrived in Chicago by train on Friday, September two nine.
When she asked to see her son, Mamie learned that A.
(15:56):
Rayner had agreed to conduct the funeral and bury the
body in the box that it had been shipped in
without opening the box. That was one of the conditions
that he had had to agree to in order to
get the body released. Mamie said if she had to
get a hammer, she would open it herself. An A. A.
Rayner finally relented. He basically told her to go home
(16:18):
and get a little rest, and he would prepare things
for her to come and view the body. Mamie tell
Mobile has described the experience of seeing her son's body
herself in a number of places, including in her memoir
The Death of Innocence, in the PBS American experience known
as the Death of Emmett Till, and in the documentary
The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. In short, she
(16:42):
was methodical, and she refused to turn away, and by
the time she was done, she had resolved that Emmett
should have an open casket funeral, to quote, let the
world see what I've seen. She also chose to have
pictures of his body published in the Chicago Defender and
in Jet Magazine, to publications with a dominantly black readership.
The photographs were then picked up in other publications from there.
(17:06):
Thousands of people attended Emmett's funeral on September three, with
tens of thousands more viewing the body which was under
a glass in the casket, and that was in the
four days that followed, and at this point the murder
had become international news, but in the white Southern press,
much of the media focus was on humanizing pieces on J. W.
Milum and Roy Bryant, covering their past military service and
(17:29):
the wholesome lives of their wives and children, and Sheriff
Strider began spreading the word that he had doubts that
the body being buried was really Emmett Tills, and that
he had evidence that the murder had really been staged
by the double a CP. Emmett Till's body was buried
on Tuesday, September six, Then on the same day, a
grand jury indited Roy Bryant and J. W. Milum for murder.
(17:52):
In Mississippi, it was common knowledge that J. W. Melum
and Roy Bryant had killed Emmett Till, but public opinion
in the white community was that they did not need
to face trial or go to prison over it. Businesses
began putting out donation jars, eventually raising ten thousand dollars
for them, even as all five attorneys practicing in the
(18:13):
town of Sumner, where the trial was to be held
signed on to represent them pro bono with Tallahatta County
authorities say mean more interested in spreading rumors and undermining
the case than in investigating it. The Double A CP
and civil rights activists, including Medgar Evers, took on their
own investigation and tried to convince the Department of Justice
(18:33):
to make it a federal case. Medgar Evers, Ruby Hurley,
and Amsey Moore, along with others, visited the cotton fields
around Money, Mississippi, to try to find witnesses who were
willing to risk their lives by testifying against white men.
In response, Sheriff Strider said Mississippi did not need or
want the help of the n Double A CP and
(18:55):
that the trial would be quote fair and impartial, before
he went on to say, quote we never had any
trouble until some of our southern end words go up north,
and then Double A CP talks to them, and then
they come back home. The trial began on September nine,
with the courtroom strictly segregated. The black reporters, witnesses, and
(19:17):
Detroit Congressman Charles Digs were all restricted to a table
in a back corner. On Mamie made her first appearance
in court, she had been receiving death threats since it
had been reported that she would be going to Mississippi
for the trial. On her way in, white reporters asked
for a number of questions that implied that she had
(19:37):
no business being there, and then as she approached the courthouse,
white boys leaned out of its windows, firing cap guns
at her, with their father's egging them on. Over the
course of the trial, mos Wright identified J. W. Milam
and Roy Bryant as the men who had taken Emmett
in the middle of the night. Willie Read, an eighteen
(19:58):
year old sharecropper, testified he had seen a group of
people in the back of a pickup truck, including somebody
he later understood to be Emett till later on. He
had seen that truck parked outside of a shed belonging
to one of J. W. Blum's relatives, and passing by
that shed, he heard quote somebody hollering, and I heard
some licks like somebody was whipping somebody. Amanda Bradley, who
(20:21):
lived nearby as well, testified that she had seen four
white men entering and exiting a barn on the property,
and all three of these witnesses testified at serious risk
to their own lives. All three of them fled Mississippi
after the trial was over because of that threat to
their lives. Mamie took the stand on the fourth day
of the trial, and at this point her surname was Bradley,
(20:42):
and she's identified in court documents as Mamie Bradley. She
testified as to her complete certainty that the body that
had come back from Mississippi was that of her son.
During the cross examination, the defense team asked her a
number of questions about whether she had life insurance for Emmett,
as though to so doubt about whether she might have
(21:02):
had her son killed for the money. You will also
sometimes in reading about this trial, UH see that Mamie
said that they asked her questions. That was something along
the lines of isn't it true that your son is
really alive in Detroit. I think this was really part
of the closing arguments and not of her questioning, because
there's a transcript that was found um and I think
(21:25):
two thousand and four of her questioning that doesn't include
that part. So I think all of that has been
kind of meshed together in her memory that trial transcript
was not found until after her death. On September, after
a little more than an hour of deliberating, a jury
of twelve white men returned a not guilty verdict in
(21:45):
the murder trial. Jurors would later say that they could
have come back much sooner, but they were told to
make it look good. Mami and several of the other
people who were with her were not actually in the courtroom.
They had realized what verdict was going to come back
and decided they would prefer not to be present for it.
Along with the murder and funeral, the trial and the
(22:06):
not guilty verdict sparked international outrage galvanized the black community
within the civil rights movement, as well as prompting an
influx of donations to the Double A CP and other
civil rights organizations. Other key events in the civil rights
movement quickly followed, including the Montgomery bus boycott and Mamie
till Mobley's words quote, when people saw what had happened
(22:28):
to my son, men stood up who had never stood
up before. After the verdict, Mamie began to travel giving
speeches about the life and the death of her son
and advocating for civil rights and anti lynching laws, and
for a time this was under the auspices of the
Double A CP, but this spell apart due to a
disagreement about her accepting payments for her speeches. But even
(22:51):
after that working relationship was over, she continued to travel
and speak about her son for most of the rest
of her life. Because Emmett had been kidnapped from one
county and killed in another, a separate grand jury was
convened in the matter of the kidnapping after the murder
trial had concluded, but just before that was to happen,
(23:11):
Anti Integration Senator James O. Eastland obtained and released the
details of the death of Emmett's father. This was when
made Me learned that Louis had been court martialed and
found guilty of murder and rape. There are a lot
of questions about this case and about whether Louis Till
was wrongfully accused, and they're way more than we can
(23:33):
get into in the scope of this podcast, but they
are detailed in the book Writing to Save a Life,
the Louis Till File. But the implication and releasing this
information to the press was that criminal behavior and sexual
violence ran in the Till family. The grand jury and
the kidnapping case of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam
(23:53):
did not return an indictment, and the case never went
to trial, even though both men had already admitted that
they did it. Maybe went to the Army to try
to find out why a senator had been given access
to records that she had not been allowed to have.
She attempted to petition the President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, but
he wouldn't meet with her and he didn't return her telegram.
(24:15):
She tried to press the FBI to open an investigation
to the death of her son, but Director J. Edgar
Hoover wrote in a memo quote, there has been no
allegation made that the victim has been subjected to the
deprivation of any right or privilege which is secured and
protected by the Constitution and the laws of the United States.
And then after all of this, I'm January six, Look
(24:40):
Magazine published an article in which Roy Bryant and J. W.
Milum confessed to killing Emmett till Their version of the story,
which they were paid about four thousand dollars to tell,
described Emmett as lewd and indecent and made it sound
as though they had acted alone, even though other people
were definitely involved. Off Once again, people were outraged. Since
(25:04):
the two men had already been found not guilty of murder,
they could not be tried again, so people called for
the kidnapping case to be reopened. Mamie tried to sue
Look Magazine and reporter William Bradford Hughey for defamation, but
the suit was dismissed because Emmett Till, not his mother,
was the person that the article defamed. The months after
(25:25):
the Look Magazine article were particularly hard for Mamie, not
only because of the way it portrayed her son, but
also because it became the source that everyone cided when
talking about the case. It really made her angry that
a number of black reporters had literally risked their lives
investigating and reporting about her son, and at this point,
(25:47):
all of that reporting was disregarded in favor of the
confession of two white men who had horrible things to
say about her son while they confessed. It was only
after a reporter called her to do a follow up
on her and she just sort of spontaneously said that
she was going to be a teacher, that she found
a new focus for her life, and soon she was
(26:08):
enrolled in Chicago Teachers College. Mamie married Gene Mobley on
June ninetifty seven while she was studying to be a teacher.
She graduated coom laude in nineteen sixty and she taught
until her retirement in Nree and every five years after
Emmett's murder, she retold his story to reporters covering the
(26:29):
anniversary of his death and the trial. In addition, she
cooperated with multiple researchers and historians working on books about
the case. She appeared in multiple documentaries, was on an
episode of OPRAH on witnesses of murders during the Civil
rights era. She was also on a radio program where
she listened on the line as Roy Bryant talked about
(26:49):
the case, including saying that Emmett Till had ruined his life.
In nineteen seventy three, she founded a theater group in
Chicago called the MTL Players. In nineteen seventy five, she
earned a master's degree in Administration and supervision from Loyola University.
She continued working with the mt CELL Players and with
her church, as well as traveling and speaking and participating
(27:12):
in ceremonies commemorating the civil rights movement for as long
as her health would allow. Mamie's mother, Alma, died on
November eleventh. Gen Mobley died on March eighteenth of two
thousand and Mamie Till Mobley died on January seventh, two
thousand three, at the age of eighty one. That was
not long before the debut of the PBS American Experienced
(27:35):
documentary The Death of Emmett Till, which she appears in.
She was also working on her memoir at the time
of her death, and that was published posthumously in May
two thousand and four. In part because of all of
this attention that came from her memoir and the American
Experienced documentary, the FBI reopened the investigation into the murder
(27:56):
of Emmett Till. It issued a lengthy report in two
thousand and six, but maintained that the statute of limitations
had run out for federal civil rights charges. No new
indictments were issued for people who had previously not been tried,
and at that point most of the people who were
involved had died. The FBI's investigation involved exhuming Emmett's body
(28:17):
for an autopsy. By law, a new casket had to
be used when the body was reburied, and at first
the original casket remained at the cemetery. Eventually members of
the family approached Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the National
Museum of African American History and Culture, about preserving it,
and it is now in the museum's collection. The photos
(28:40):
of her son that she chose to share through Jet
magazine and the Chicago Defender are now one of Time
Magazine's one most influential pictures of all time, and in
her words, quote if it can further the cause of freedom,
then I will say that he died a hero that
made me till mobile. She was stronger than I think
(29:01):
I could have been in the same circumstances. I I
agree with that, sincement a lot um her name is
brought up a lot sometimes um as criticism of other mothers,
which I don't like. The degree of grace and determination
(29:25):
that she approached so many things with is I like,
just not if that's an incredibly high bar. Yeah, that's
like a superhuman standard to hold up for comparison. Yeah yeah, um.
And it also is really important to note that she
really she the places that she chose to share the
pictures of her son were places with a predominantly black audience,
(29:47):
like that that was who she was most interested in
making sure they had seen what had happened to her child.
And while it did also spread outrage among white communities,
um and and lead to some uh like white involvement
in the civil rights movement, that overwhelmingly it was something
that galvanized people and inspired people to act within black communities.
(30:12):
Um Like when you look at pictures of the funeral,
the people who who came to see the body into
the funeral, like, it's a it's an overwhelmingly black crowd.
I think in more recent years, sometimes on social media
it gets twisted around with a weird idea that it
was crucial to getting white people involved in the movement,
(30:34):
and while that was kind of an after effect like
that was not the primary source of of inspiring people
to act. I'm hoping with fingers crossed, the listener mail
is a little bit of a relief because this is
a very heavy episode. It is very heavy episode, and
unfortunately listener Mail is not not like a super fun
time Tracy, I know, uh so we have gotten the
(31:00):
same question slash comment about our recent episode, the Calicacs
and the Eugenicists a number of times enough times that
I wanted to address it rather than reading anyone particular
one of the emails. A lot of people have written
into asked why we did not talk about Margaret Singer
in that episode, and overwhelmingly these have included an either
(31:24):
implied or explicit accusation that we didn't bring her up
because of her because of our personal politics, which is
not the case. Long story short, that episode was really
focused on the Calicac family study and the role that
it played in compulsory sterilization programs. So that episode was
not about reversible contraception like diaphragms and sperm sides, or
(31:47):
on the eugenics movement in general, And if it had
been about either of those things, we definitely would have
talked about Margaret Singer. But there is a huge difference
between permanently sterilizing somebody without their concern and fitting them
for a diaphragm and teaching them how to use it.
Um If if it had been about birth control, or
(32:08):
if it had been about the eugenics movement in general,
we certainly would have talked about Margaret Sanger, and we
did in fact talk about Margaret Singer in our episode
on Katherine Dexter McCormick and the development of oral contraception
because it was relevant to what we were talking about. Basically,
Margaret Sanger's work and legacy are also really complicated and
messy and full of nuance, and getting into that would
(32:31):
have been a just huge and lengthy, uh digression in
an episode that was really focused on something else. So
to be clear, it's definitely true that Margaret Singer bought
into an advocated eugenics and thought that through contraception, humanity
could quote weed out the unfit, just in her words,
But unlike what we were talking about in the Calacac episode,
(32:54):
her work was overwhelmingly focused on choice. She thought that
people should be able to us not to get pregnant.
And when she was doing the part of her work
that was like really focused on birth control advocacy, it
was illegal to publish or distribute information about contraception, and
a lot of in a lot of places, contraceptives were
either illegal themselves or really hard to get, so her
(33:18):
work was really focused on changing that. She thought that
preventing pregnancy would help lift people out of poverty and
help improve their quality of life. And she also thought
that birth control was the key to reducing the number
of abortions, which were also illegal and very dangerous. And
so even when she talked about sterilization, she usually, but
(33:38):
to be clear, not universally, described it as a choice,
not as something that would be done in a compulsory way.
So her work was just focused in a different way
from the things that we were talking about in that show,
people also brought up her work with the black community.
It is also true that Margaret Sanger worked on a
program specifically to bring contraception into black communities starting in
(34:02):
about nineteen thirty nine. This was known as the Negro Project,
and there were and still are people who think that
this was a covert effort at genocide. But while she
was definitely pretty paternalistic and how she talked about race,
which is also two of how she talked about disability,
she outlined reasons for the Negro Project and the same
(34:23):
way that she outlined the need for birth control among
poor white communities, which is that it would help people
lift themselves out of poverty if they had the option
of having fewer children up. She also thought that having
a program that was targeted specifically at black communities would
help counteract the fact that most black people were excluded
from public health clinics which were only for white patients.
(34:45):
So in this whole project, she had the support of
a lot of black leaders and activists, but she also
wrote an observation that black clergy could help gain the
trust of black communities in a really poorly phrased way,
like if you read this center, it's like just terribly worded.
And that wasn't a letter in nineteen thirty nine, And
(35:07):
this one sentence from that letter, combined with some other
quotes that are actually fabricated, have led to a persistent
belief that she went around being like, you know, what
we could do is just stop having black people if
we got them out birth control, and like that's that's
not the case. Um, there are definitely people who who
believe that, like, white efforts to introduce birth control into
(35:30):
black communities are an effort at genocide, and like, I don't,
I feel like that's beyond the scope of what we're
talking about. But a lot of the points that people
made about this particular aspect of her work are are
based on things that were not actually true. So rather
than raising up all the various other points that people
made in their emails about this um in order to
(35:51):
refute them, because people said a lot of false things
to us in these emails, we are going to link
to a few fact checks about Margaret Singer in the
show notes um for this episode. So yeah, long story short,
we have never turned away from the fact that Margaret
Singer was into eugenics, but like Margaret Singer was not
really quite so relevant to this story that we were
(36:15):
telling in that particular episode. And there you have it. Yeah. Uh,
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast or at history podcast at how
stuff works dot com, or also on Facebook at Facebook
dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at
miss in history. Are tumbler is a missed in History
(36:36):
dot tumbler dot com, or on pinterest pinterest dot com
slash miss in history. Our instagram is that missing History. Also,
you can come to our parent company's website, which is
how stuff Works dot com and find all kinds of
information about anything your heart desires. And then you can
come to our website, which is missed in History dot com.
You will find show Notes. You will find the links
(36:57):
to some fact checks that we just talked about in
the show notes of this episode. Also a searchable archive
every episode we have ever done, so you can do
all that and a whole lot more how stuff works
dot com or missed in history dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com.
Welcome to STUFH you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. For the
most part, until the ninety nineties or so, a lot
of times timelines of the civil rights movement in the
(00:22):
United States marked its beginning as either brown versus Board
on May seventeenth of nineteen fifty four, or with Rosa
Parks refusal to give up her bus seat on December one.
And it's definitely true that movements usually have multiple beginning parts.
A lot of times people will note like one keystone moment,
(00:45):
but usually there are a lot of things that happened.
But these uh timelines from a couple of decades ago
often didn't really pay a lot of attention to another
event that happened in between those two, which was the
August nineteen five five murder of fourteen year old Emmett Till.
But then a couple of books came out that started
(01:06):
to change all of that. One was a Death in
the Delta, The Story of Emmett Till by Stephen J. Whitfield,
which came out in Night, and the other was Emmett
Till The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement, which
was based on Cleonora Hudson Weems doctoral dissertation UM and
that second but came out in nineteen nine four. So,
along with other writings, these two books really started to
(01:30):
bring renewed public attention to the murder into the role
that it played as a really powerful catalyst in the
civil rights movement. Multiple other books have followed, and then
includes some that were published as recently as fifteen and
twenty seventeen, which is the year that we're recording this episode.
But the reason that Emmett Till's murder played such a
(01:51):
consequential role in the civil rights movement is really the
choices that his mother made me Till mobily made. She
faced the death of her child with extraordinary bravery and
clarity and grace, and for more than forty five years
after his murder, she continually worked to make sure that
he didn't die in vain. So she is who we
are going to talk about today, and maybe Elizabeth Carthon
(02:14):
was born on November twenty three in Webb, Mississippi. When
she was about two years old, her family moved to Argo, Illinois,
which is outside of Chicago during the Great Migration, and
her father, wily Nash Carthon, had gotten a job at
Argo Corn Products resigning company, and today Argo is actually
known as Summit. Mamie's father left when she was about eleven,
(02:39):
but even before that point she was really closest to
her mother, Alma. Her upbringing was strict and disciplined and religious,
and her mother helped found the Argo Temple, Church of
God in Christ. Alma pushed Mamie to do well in
school while also sheltering her from worldlier things. So in
her memoir, Maymie tell Mobili would go on to describe
(03:00):
herself as naive and trusting and really having a lot
to catch up on once she was a wife and mother.
Herself and their neighborhood in Argo was predominantly black, but
the high school, Argo Community High School was predominantly white.
Maymie became the first black student to make the schools
a honor role and the fourth black student to graduate,
and when she graduated, she was first in her class.
(03:24):
She married Louis Till on October fourteenth of nineteen forty,
when both of them were eighteen, and on July one,
they had a son, Emmett Louis Till, who Maybe named
after his father and her favorite uncle. But even before
Emmett was born, a family friend had taken to calling
him the little Bobo, and so his family and his
(03:44):
friends generally called him Bobo or Bo for the rest
of his life. Mamie's relationship with Emmett's father didn't last long.
While Emmett was still a baby, Louis assaulted Maymie one night,
and she defended herself with a pot of hot water. Eventually,
she got a restraining order and moved back in with
her mother, working as a clerk typist while Alma looked
(04:05):
after Emmett. And after Louis repeatedly broke the restraining order,
they wound up in court where the judge gave him
the option of the military or jail, and he chose
the former. Maybe didn't hear from Louis for several months
after that, but when she did, he let her know
that he had made arrangements for her to receive part
of his military pay. But on July thirteenth of nineteen
(04:27):
forty five, Maybe got a telegram that Louis had been
killed in Italy. We'll go into a little more detail
about this later in the episode, but for the rest
of Emmett's life, the only information that Maybe had was
that his father had died due to quote willful misconduct,
and that for that reason they wouldn't receive survivor benefits.
Emmett was just about to turn four when his father died,
(04:50):
and the only one of Louis's possessions that made me
received from the army after his death was a signet
ring engraved with his initials, which she passed on to
her son. Emmett grew into a funny, fearless boy who
liked to crack jokes and dress well, and when he
was about five, he contracted polio. He had to be
quarantined at home for about a month after he recovered.
(05:13):
The only lingering effect was that he spoke often with
a stutter, and that was especially when he was nervous
or excited. During Emmett's youngest years, Alma raised him while
Mamie worked, and Maybe would go on to describe her
relationship with her son really is very sibling like. Although
Mamie was working to support the family, Alma was really
the one running it, and in many ways she acted
(05:35):
as mother for both her daughter and her grandson. But
eventually Emma moved to Chicago and Mamie stayed behind in
Argo with Emmett, along with a network of cousins and
other family members who had moved to Illinois from Mississippi.
This extended family was large and they were all really
close to each other. Various members would take trips back
(05:56):
and forth between the two states to visit one another.
He eventually, Mamie decided to move to Detroit to try
to reconnect with her father, who she hadn't had much
contact with it all since she was young, and there
she met Pink Bradley and they got married on May
five of nineteen fifty one. Emmett wasn't very happy in Detroit, though,
(06:17):
and he begged his mother to be allowed to go
back to Chicago to live with his grandmother. Maymie eventually agreed,
but things really just weren't working out for her in
Detroit either. She was working long hours while also trying
to go back and forth to Chicago to visit Emmett
and her mother. So finally, after Almas sold her old
house in Argo and bought a two unit building in Chicago,
(06:40):
maybe Pink and Emmett moved into one of those two units,
but not long after they moved in, Maymie discovered that
Pink was seeing another woman, so she threw him out
and divorced him. By the time he was eleven, Emmett
Till had grown into an energetic and industrious boy with
a bit of a mischievous streak. After Mamie's divorced from
Pink Bradley, he became fiercely protective of his mother, and
(07:03):
he also took on a lot of responsibilities at home.
Maybe worked all day first for the Social Security Administration
and then for the Air Force, so Emmett did a
lot of the cooking and took care of the house.
And it wasn't just cooking and cleaning. When Maybe bought
linoleum for the kitchen floor and then bad weather kept
the people who were supposed to help install it from
(07:23):
being able to come, Emmett worked out how to do
it himself, which led to the two of them tackling
a whole range of home improvement projects together. He was
also fond of working to make a little extra money,
doing things like running errands and delivering groceries. Maybe met
Gene Mobley one day when she went to get her
nails done. Jean was working at Ford Motor Company during
(07:45):
the day and he was working as a barber at night.
He seemed interested in her immediately, but she didn't really
think he was her type, and she was understandably reluctant
to start another relationship. But that started to change when
she saw how good he was with Emmett and the
summer of nineteen fifty five, Emmett wanted to go visit
his family in Mississippi, and we're going to take a
(08:06):
quick sponsor break before we talk about that. In the
summer of nineteen fifty five, Maybe began planning a vacation,
planned a road trip with Jeane and Emmett. First they
would go to Detroit and then to Omaha. But Emmett
really had a different idea. Mamie's uncle mos Right, who
(08:30):
was a preacher and sharecropper who lived outside of money Mississippi,
had come up to Chicago for a funeral, and when
he went back home, he was going to take Emmett's
cousin and close friend, Wheeler Parker with him for a visit.
Another Chicago cousin, Curtis Jones, was going to join them
in Mississippi. As well. This sounded like a tremendous adventure.
(08:50):
It was, in Mamie's words, as close to summer camp
as Emmett was going to get and Emmett was set ongoing.
And this idea, though made Mamie incredibly nervous, she did
finally agree to it. Before Emmett left, his mother had
a talk with him, As she framed it in her
memoir quote the talk every black parent had with every
child sent down South back then, it was a talk
(09:12):
about what white society expected of black people in the
Deep South. She told him to speak only when spoken to,
and to say yes ma'am and no ma'am, and yes
or and no sir. And if he saw a white
woman walking down the sidewalk, he was to step off
the sidewalk and lower his head and wait until she
had passed to get back on it again, without ever
looking directly at her or making eye contact. Mamie hoped
(09:35):
that this talk that she had with him, and the
fact that he would be in the care of family
who actually lived in Mississippi and knew all these unwritten
rules intuitively would keep him safe while he was there.
He left on August twenty nine. They were running late
that morning, and when they got to the train station,
he ran up to the platform without kissing Mami goodbye.
(09:57):
She called him back and he gave her a kiss
and his watch, saying he wasn't going to need it
while he was gone, and she asked if he also
wanted her to hang on to his father's ring, which
he was wearing, and he said that he wanted to
show it off to his cousin's. Maybe had intended to
go ahead and take the vacation she'd been planning, but
she couldn't motivate herself to get ready for it. She
(10:18):
just missed Emmett terribly, and even though they'd been separated before,
this was different. She was worried sick about him, and
since the Rights didn't have a phone, it wasn't easy
for her to check on him. The only way she
could talk to him was if she called one of
the Rights neighbors who did have a phone and see
if they could find him. Maybe got a letter from
Emment on August enclosed with a note from her aunt
(10:40):
Lizzie Wright saying what a nice voice she had raised.
Emmett's letter asked if she could please get his bike
fixed before he got home. That night, Mamie hosted a
meeting for her Ladies Club, which was her first real
social interaction since Emmett had gone to Mississippi. Having people
around felt like a welcome relief, and everybody stayed up
so late talk gang and visiting that she made an
(11:01):
early breakfast before people left, and then went to bed
to try to get some sleep before church. Then about
nine thirty in the morning on August Maymie got a
call from her cousin, Willie May Jones that was Curtis's mother,
and Willie May told Mamie that some white men had
come and taken Emmett away from the Rights home in
(11:21):
the middle of the night. Here's what had happened. On August.
Emmett and his cousins had driven in some money Mississippi
to buy some gum and candy at Bryant's grocery store.
There are a lot of conflicting reports about exactly what
happened while they were there. Caroline Bryant, the proprietor's wife,
claimed that he had physically grabbed her, threatened her, and
(11:44):
made lewd comments to her while he was in the store.
In the book The Blood of Emmett's Hell was published,
in which she admitted that all of that was false. Witnesses,
including some of Emmett's cousins, said that at some point
Emmett whistled at Caroline. His cousins theorized that it might
have been to try to impress them or make them laugh,
(12:05):
and his mother theorized that he had whistled because he
was stuttering. That was a trick that he had learned
that could help him get his words out when he
was having trouble. Regardless, and its cousins weren't impressed or amused,
they were scared. They all piled back into the car
and drove away as quickly as possible, even at one
point abandoning the car to cut through the fields and hide.
(12:26):
They talked among themselves about whether they should send Emmett
back to Chicago, but a couple of days later, when
nothing bad had happened, they forgot about it. But then
at about two thirty am on August, Caroline Bryant's husband,
Roy and his brother in law J. W. Milum showed
up at the right home asking for the boy from Chicago,
(12:46):
the one who had quote done all that talk. Mose
and Lizzie Wright. Both tried to reason with them and
even offered them money to just leave Emmett alone, but
the two men, who were armed, refused, so that was
all that they only knew at that point. After she
got the call from William ay Jones, Mamie called Jean.
They went together to her mother's house to tell her
(13:07):
what had happened and to wait for news of Emmett.
Both women were distraught, especially since they couldn't reach the
rights for an update. Soon Maymie started calling newspapers, and
when reporters arrived, she told them that white men had
come into her uncle's home and money Mississippi and kidnapped
her son. On Monday morning, Augustin ray Field Moody, the
(13:28):
nephew of Alma's husband, connected Mamie to the Chicago office
of the N Double A c P. The N Double
A CP referred her to William Henry Huff, chairman of
the Legal Redress Committee. The two men began putting Mamie
in touch with people and resources in both Mississippi and Illinois.
Soon Illinois Governor William Stratton, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley,
(13:51):
and Congressman William Dawson were involved in the search for Emmon.
They were making and receiving so many calls that the
family added a second phone line. That same day, Roy
Bryant and J. W. Milem were arrested for kidnapping Emmett Till,
something they both admitted that they had done in Chicago.
The family kept waiting, making calls and sending money to
(14:13):
Mississippi to help with the search, and then on Wednesday,
August thirty one, they got the news a fisherman had
found Emmett's body in the Tallahatchee River. He had been
badly beaten and probably shot, and his body had been
weighed down with the fan of a cotton gin tied
to his neck with barbed wire. His body was so
(14:33):
badly disfigured that they were only able to identify him
by his father's ring, which he was still wearing. And
Mississippi tallahatche County Sheriff HC. Strider called in a black
undertaker and told him to bury the body immediately, and
it's cousin Curtis, called home to make sure Mamie knew
what was happening. Mamie, of course, did not want her
(14:54):
son to be buried in Mississippi. She and others started
making calls adamant that Emmett's body be returned to Chicago,
and they eventually contacted A. A. Rayner, a black funeral
director in Chicago who took over the arrangements, and he
eventually let Mamie know that they could bring the body back,
but that it would cost three thousand, three hundred dollars.
(15:14):
That was nearly Mamie's annual salary, but she agreed. Demanding
that Emmett's body be brought back to Chicago and not
buried in Mississippi was the first of several actions that
Mamie would take that would propel her son's death into
the international spotlight and then go on to spark a
ground swell of civil rights activism. So we're gonna talk
(15:36):
about that more. After another quick sponsor break, Emmett Till's
body arrived in Chicago by train on Friday, September two nine.
When she asked to see her son, Mamie learned that A.
(15:56):
Rayner had agreed to conduct the funeral and bury the
body in the box that it had been shipped in
without opening the box. That was one of the conditions
that he had had to agree to in order to
get the body released. Mamie said if she had to
get a hammer, she would open it herself. An A. A.
Rayner finally relented. He basically told her to go home
(16:18):
and get a little rest, and he would prepare things
for her to come and view the body. Mamie tell
Mobile has described the experience of seeing her son's body
herself in a number of places, including in her memoir
The Death of Innocence, in the PBS American experience known
as the Death of Emmett Till, and in the documentary
The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. In short, she
(16:42):
was methodical, and she refused to turn away, and by
the time she was done, she had resolved that Emmett
should have an open casket funeral, to quote, let the
world see what I've seen. She also chose to have
pictures of his body published in the Chicago Defender and
in Jet Magazine, to publications with a dominantly black readership.
The photographs were then picked up in other publications from there.
(17:06):
Thousands of people attended Emmett's funeral on September three, with
tens of thousands more viewing the body which was under
a glass in the casket, and that was in the
four days that followed, and at this point the murder
had become international news, but in the white Southern press,
much of the media focus was on humanizing pieces on J. W.
Milum and Roy Bryant, covering their past military service and
(17:29):
the wholesome lives of their wives and children, and Sheriff
Strider began spreading the word that he had doubts that
the body being buried was really Emmett Tills, and that
he had evidence that the murder had really been staged
by the double a CP. Emmett Till's body was buried
on Tuesday, September six, Then on the same day, a
grand jury indited Roy Bryant and J. W. Milum for murder.
(17:52):
In Mississippi, it was common knowledge that J. W. Melum
and Roy Bryant had killed Emmett Till, but public opinion
in the white community was that they did not need
to face trial or go to prison over it. Businesses
began putting out donation jars, eventually raising ten thousand dollars
for them, even as all five attorneys practicing in the
(18:13):
town of Sumner, where the trial was to be held
signed on to represent them pro bono with Tallahatta County
authorities say mean more interested in spreading rumors and undermining
the case than in investigating it. The Double A CP
and civil rights activists, including Medgar Evers, took on their
own investigation and tried to convince the Department of Justice
(18:33):
to make it a federal case. Medgar Evers, Ruby Hurley,
and Amsey Moore, along with others, visited the cotton fields
around Money, Mississippi, to try to find witnesses who were
willing to risk their lives by testifying against white men.
In response, Sheriff Strider said Mississippi did not need or
want the help of the n Double A CP and
(18:55):
that the trial would be quote fair and impartial, before
he went on to say, quote we never had any
trouble until some of our southern end words go up north,
and then Double A CP talks to them, and then
they come back home. The trial began on September nine,
with the courtroom strictly segregated. The black reporters, witnesses, and
(19:17):
Detroit Congressman Charles Digs were all restricted to a table
in a back corner. On Mamie made her first appearance
in court, she had been receiving death threats since it
had been reported that she would be going to Mississippi
for the trial. On her way in, white reporters asked
for a number of questions that implied that she had
(19:37):
no business being there, and then as she approached the courthouse,
white boys leaned out of its windows, firing cap guns
at her, with their father's egging them on. Over the
course of the trial, mos Wright identified J. W. Milam
and Roy Bryant as the men who had taken Emmett
in the middle of the night. Willie Read, an eighteen
(19:58):
year old sharecropper, testified he had seen a group of
people in the back of a pickup truck, including somebody
he later understood to be Emett till later on. He
had seen that truck parked outside of a shed belonging
to one of J. W. Blum's relatives, and passing by
that shed, he heard quote somebody hollering, and I heard
some licks like somebody was whipping somebody. Amanda Bradley, who
(20:21):
lived nearby as well, testified that she had seen four
white men entering and exiting a barn on the property,
and all three of these witnesses testified at serious risk
to their own lives. All three of them fled Mississippi
after the trial was over because of that threat to
their lives. Mamie took the stand on the fourth day
of the trial, and at this point her surname was Bradley,
(20:42):
and she's identified in court documents as Mamie Bradley. She
testified as to her complete certainty that the body that
had come back from Mississippi was that of her son.
During the cross examination, the defense team asked her a
number of questions about whether she had life insurance for Emmett,
as though to so doubt about whether she might have
(21:02):
had her son killed for the money. You will also
sometimes in reading about this trial, UH see that Mamie
said that they asked her questions. That was something along
the lines of isn't it true that your son is
really alive in Detroit. I think this was really part
of the closing arguments and not of her questioning, because
there's a transcript that was found um and I think
(21:25):
two thousand and four of her questioning that doesn't include
that part. So I think all of that has been
kind of meshed together in her memory that trial transcript
was not found until after her death. On September, after
a little more than an hour of deliberating, a jury
of twelve white men returned a not guilty verdict in
(21:45):
the murder trial. Jurors would later say that they could
have come back much sooner, but they were told to
make it look good. Mami and several of the other
people who were with her were not actually in the courtroom.
They had realized what verdict was going to come back
and decided they would prefer not to be present for it.
Along with the murder and funeral, the trial and the
(22:06):
not guilty verdict sparked international outrage galvanized the black community
within the civil rights movement, as well as prompting an
influx of donations to the Double A CP and other
civil rights organizations. Other key events in the civil rights
movement quickly followed, including the Montgomery bus boycott and Mamie
till Mobley's words quote, when people saw what had happened
(22:28):
to my son, men stood up who had never stood
up before. After the verdict, Mamie began to travel giving
speeches about the life and the death of her son
and advocating for civil rights and anti lynching laws, and
for a time this was under the auspices of the
Double A CP, but this spell apart due to a
disagreement about her accepting payments for her speeches. But even
(22:51):
after that working relationship was over, she continued to travel
and speak about her son for most of the rest
of her life. Because Emmett had been kidnapped from one
county and killed in another, a separate grand jury was
convened in the matter of the kidnapping after the murder
trial had concluded, but just before that was to happen,
(23:11):
Anti Integration Senator James O. Eastland obtained and released the
details of the death of Emmett's father. This was when
made Me learned that Louis had been court martialed and
found guilty of murder and rape. There are a lot
of questions about this case and about whether Louis Till
was wrongfully accused, and they're way more than we can
(23:33):
get into in the scope of this podcast, but they
are detailed in the book Writing to Save a Life,
the Louis Till File. But the implication and releasing this
information to the press was that criminal behavior and sexual
violence ran in the Till family. The grand jury and
the kidnapping case of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam
(23:53):
did not return an indictment, and the case never went
to trial, even though both men had already admitted that
they did it. Maybe went to the Army to try
to find out why a senator had been given access
to records that she had not been allowed to have.
She attempted to petition the President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, but
he wouldn't meet with her and he didn't return her telegram.
(24:15):
She tried to press the FBI to open an investigation
to the death of her son, but Director J. Edgar
Hoover wrote in a memo quote, there has been no
allegation made that the victim has been subjected to the
deprivation of any right or privilege which is secured and
protected by the Constitution and the laws of the United States.
And then after all of this, I'm January six, Look
(24:40):
Magazine published an article in which Roy Bryant and J. W.
Milum confessed to killing Emmett till Their version of the story,
which they were paid about four thousand dollars to tell,
described Emmett as lewd and indecent and made it sound
as though they had acted alone, even though other people
were definitely involved. Off Once again, people were outraged. Since
(25:04):
the two men had already been found not guilty of murder,
they could not be tried again, so people called for
the kidnapping case to be reopened. Mamie tried to sue
Look Magazine and reporter William Bradford Hughey for defamation, but
the suit was dismissed because Emmett Till, not his mother,
was the person that the article defamed. The months after
(25:25):
the Look Magazine article were particularly hard for Mamie, not
only because of the way it portrayed her son, but
also because it became the source that everyone cided when
talking about the case. It really made her angry that
a number of black reporters had literally risked their lives
investigating and reporting about her son, and at this point,
(25:47):
all of that reporting was disregarded in favor of the
confession of two white men who had horrible things to
say about her son while they confessed. It was only
after a reporter called her to do a follow up
on her and she just sort of spontaneously said that
she was going to be a teacher, that she found
a new focus for her life, and soon she was
(26:08):
enrolled in Chicago Teachers College. Mamie married Gene Mobley on
June ninetifty seven while she was studying to be a teacher.
She graduated coom laude in nineteen sixty and she taught
until her retirement in Nree and every five years after
Emmett's murder, she retold his story to reporters covering the
(26:29):
anniversary of his death and the trial. In addition, she
cooperated with multiple researchers and historians working on books about
the case. She appeared in multiple documentaries, was on an
episode of OPRAH on witnesses of murders during the Civil
rights era. She was also on a radio program where
she listened on the line as Roy Bryant talked about
(26:49):
the case, including saying that Emmett Till had ruined his life.
In nineteen seventy three, she founded a theater group in
Chicago called the MTL Players. In nineteen seventy five, she
earned a master's degree in Administration and supervision from Loyola University.
She continued working with the mt CELL Players and with
her church, as well as traveling and speaking and participating
(27:12):
in ceremonies commemorating the civil rights movement for as long
as her health would allow. Mamie's mother, Alma, died on
November eleventh. Gen Mobley died on March eighteenth of two
thousand and Mamie Till Mobley died on January seventh, two
thousand three, at the age of eighty one. That was
not long before the debut of the PBS American Experienced
(27:35):
documentary The Death of Emmett Till, which she appears in.
She was also working on her memoir at the time
of her death, and that was published posthumously in May
two thousand and four. In part because of all of
this attention that came from her memoir and the American
Experienced documentary, the FBI reopened the investigation into the murder
(27:56):
of Emmett Till. It issued a lengthy report in two
thousand and six, but maintained that the statute of limitations
had run out for federal civil rights charges. No new
indictments were issued for people who had previously not been tried,
and at that point most of the people who were
involved had died. The FBI's investigation involved exhuming Emmett's body
(28:17):
for an autopsy. By law, a new casket had to
be used when the body was reburied, and at first
the original casket remained at the cemetery. Eventually members of
the family approached Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the National
Museum of African American History and Culture, about preserving it,
and it is now in the museum's collection. The photos
(28:40):
of her son that she chose to share through Jet
magazine and the Chicago Defender are now one of Time
Magazine's one most influential pictures of all time, and in
her words, quote if it can further the cause of freedom,
then I will say that he died a hero that
made me till mobile. She was stronger than I think
(29:01):
I could have been in the same circumstances. I I
agree with that, sincement a lot um her name is
brought up a lot sometimes um as criticism of other mothers,
which I don't like. The degree of grace and determination
(29:25):
that she approached so many things with is I like,
just not if that's an incredibly high bar. Yeah, that's
like a superhuman standard to hold up for comparison. Yeah yeah, um.
And it also is really important to note that she
really she the places that she chose to share the
pictures of her son were places with a predominantly black audience,
(29:47):
like that that was who she was most interested in
making sure they had seen what had happened to her child.
And while it did also spread outrage among white communities,
um and and lead to some uh like white involvement
in the civil rights movement, that overwhelmingly it was something
that galvanized people and inspired people to act within black communities.
(30:12):
Um Like when you look at pictures of the funeral,
the people who who came to see the body into
the funeral, like, it's a it's an overwhelmingly black crowd.
I think in more recent years, sometimes on social media
it gets twisted around with a weird idea that it
was crucial to getting white people involved in the movement,
(30:34):
and while that was kind of an after effect like
that was not the primary source of of inspiring people
to act. I'm hoping with fingers crossed, the listener mail
is a little bit of a relief because this is
a very heavy episode. It is very heavy episode, and
unfortunately listener Mail is not not like a super fun
time Tracy, I know, uh so we have gotten the
(31:00):
same question slash comment about our recent episode, the Calicacs
and the Eugenicists a number of times enough times that
I wanted to address it rather than reading anyone particular
one of the emails. A lot of people have written
into asked why we did not talk about Margaret Singer
in that episode, and overwhelmingly these have included an either
(31:24):
implied or explicit accusation that we didn't bring her up
because of her because of our personal politics, which is
not the case. Long story short, that episode was really
focused on the Calicac family study and the role that
it played in compulsory sterilization programs. So that episode was
not about reversible contraception like diaphragms and sperm sides, or
(31:47):
on the eugenics movement in general, And if it had
been about either of those things, we definitely would have
talked about Margaret Singer. But there is a huge difference
between permanently sterilizing somebody without their concern and fitting them
for a diaphragm and teaching them how to use it.
Um If if it had been about birth control, or
(32:08):
if it had been about the eugenics movement in general,
we certainly would have talked about Margaret Sanger, and we
did in fact talk about Margaret Singer in our episode
on Katherine Dexter McCormick and the development of oral contraception
because it was relevant to what we were talking about. Basically,
Margaret Sanger's work and legacy are also really complicated and
messy and full of nuance, and getting into that would
(32:31):
have been a just huge and lengthy, uh digression in
an episode that was really focused on something else. So
to be clear, it's definitely true that Margaret Singer bought
into an advocated eugenics and thought that through contraception, humanity
could quote weed out the unfit, just in her words,
But unlike what we were talking about in the Calacac episode,
(32:54):
her work was overwhelmingly focused on choice. She thought that
people should be able to us not to get pregnant.
And when she was doing the part of her work
that was like really focused on birth control advocacy, it
was illegal to publish or distribute information about contraception, and
a lot of in a lot of places, contraceptives were
either illegal themselves or really hard to get, so her
(33:18):
work was really focused on changing that. She thought that
preventing pregnancy would help lift people out of poverty and
help improve their quality of life. And she also thought
that birth control was the key to reducing the number
of abortions, which were also illegal and very dangerous. And
so even when she talked about sterilization, she usually, but
(33:38):
to be clear, not universally, described it as a choice,
not as something that would be done in a compulsory way.
So her work was just focused in a different way
from the things that we were talking about in that show,
people also brought up her work with the black community.
It is also true that Margaret Sanger worked on a
program specifically to bring contraception into black communities starting in
(34:02):
about nineteen thirty nine. This was known as the Negro Project,
and there were and still are people who think that
this was a covert effort at genocide. But while she
was definitely pretty paternalistic and how she talked about race,
which is also two of how she talked about disability,
she outlined reasons for the Negro Project and the same
(34:23):
way that she outlined the need for birth control among
poor white communities, which is that it would help people
lift themselves out of poverty if they had the option
of having fewer children up. She also thought that having
a program that was targeted specifically at black communities would
help counteract the fact that most black people were excluded
from public health clinics which were only for white patients.
(34:45):
So in this whole project, she had the support of
a lot of black leaders and activists, but she also
wrote an observation that black clergy could help gain the
trust of black communities in a really poorly phrased way,
like if you read this center, it's like just terribly worded.
And that wasn't a letter in nineteen thirty nine, And
(35:07):
this one sentence from that letter, combined with some other
quotes that are actually fabricated, have led to a persistent
belief that she went around being like, you know, what
we could do is just stop having black people if
we got them out birth control, and like that's that's
not the case. Um, there are definitely people who who
believe that, like, white efforts to introduce birth control into
(35:30):
black communities are an effort at genocide, and like, I don't,
I feel like that's beyond the scope of what we're
talking about. But a lot of the points that people
made about this particular aspect of her work are are
based on things that were not actually true. So rather
than raising up all the various other points that people
made in their emails about this um in order to
(35:51):
refute them, because people said a lot of false things
to us in these emails, we are going to link
to a few fact checks about Margaret Singer in the
show notes um for this episode. So yeah, long story short,
we have never turned away from the fact that Margaret
Singer was into eugenics, but like Margaret Singer was not
really quite so relevant to this story that we were
(36:15):
telling in that particular episode. And there you have it. Yeah. Uh,
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other podcast or at history podcast at how
stuff works dot com, or also on Facebook at Facebook
dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at
miss in history. Are tumbler is a missed in History
(36:36):
dot tumbler dot com, or on pinterest pinterest dot com
slash miss in history. Our instagram is that missing History. Also,
you can come to our parent company's website, which is
how stuff Works dot com and find all kinds of
information about anything your heart desires. And then you can
come to our website, which is missed in History dot com.
You will find show Notes. You will find the links
(36:57):
to some fact checks that we just talked about in
the show notes of this episode. Also a searchable archive
every episode we have ever done, so you can do
all that and a whole lot more how stuff works
dot com or missed in history dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.