Death of Innocence:
The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America
By Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson
Random House, 290 pages, $24.95
There are no memorials in Money, Miss., reminding visitors of what happened there nearly 50 years ago. The town itself, nearly abandoned, seems on the verge of sinking into the rich soil of the Mississippi Delta. There are no signs off the main roads directing travelers to Money. Only a U.S. Post Office set in a small trailer confirms that this is the place where a black Chicago teenager allegedly violated Southern racial etiquette and then was murdered for his offense, a hate crime that helped set in motion forces that would transform the country.
In late summer 1955, Mamie Till placed her 14-year-old son, Emmett, on an Illinois Central train heading south so he could spend two weeks visiting relatives in Money. One hot afternoon Till and a few of his cousins and friends went to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market for refreshments. There Carolyn Bryant, the wife of the proprietor, concluded, without justification according to Till’s mother, that he had insulted her. Three days later, Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, kidnapped Till from his great-uncle’s home in the middle of the night. He was beaten, killed and tossed into the Tallahatchie River with a gin fan tied to his neck.
More Top Picks Best Polarized Sunglasses For Light Sensitivity
When news of Till’s disappearance reached his mother in Chicago, she nearly fainted. As she recalls in her new autobiography, “Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America,” written with journalist Christopher Benson, she had debated whether to permit her only son to go to Mississippi, the place of her birth, without her. She had prepared him for the rigid racial practices there. “He had to understand that he would not be in Chicago and had to act differently,” she writes. “I wanted him to be aware of this at all times.”
Three days later her worst nightmare came true. Her son’s body, swollen and mangled, was discovered in the muddy Tallahatchie.
Though racked with grief, Mamie Till kept her head. She demanded that her son not be buried in Mississippi as local authorities had hoped. She inspected her son’s body when it arrived in Chicago, despite orders from Mississippi officials that the casket stay sealed. After her inspection, which is recounted in one of the most searing passages in a moving book, she insisted that the casket remain open during her son’s funeral. ” ‘Let the world see what I’ve seen,’ ” she said.
Tens of thousands of people paid their respects to Emmett Till at the viewing of the casket and the funeral on Chicago’s South Side. According to one estimate, nearly one in five collapsed after seeing his disfigured face. And many more were led to question Southern racial ways because of the extensive coverage by the American and international press.
Mamie Till also committed herself to bringing her son’s killers to justice. She traveled to Mississippi in September to testify at the murder trial of Bryant and Milam, who insisted they had released Till alive after having abducted him. In the segregated Sumner County Courthouse, she told the jury that the body found in the river was indeed her son. Two other black witnesses directly indicted Bryant and Milam, testimony that would force both witnesses to leave their home state for fear of retaliation. But the members of the all-white jury were not ready to convict two of their own. Bryant and Milam were acquitted, though later, in a story for Look magazine, they would tell how they killed Emmett Till.
In recent months there has been a resurgence in interest in the Till murder. Two new documentaries have been screened (which have raised awareness that accomplices to the murder are likely still alive), and a new book of documents about the Till case has been published. Last January, Mamie Till-Mobley died at 81, prompting tributes to this courageous woman and commentary about the lynching of her son.
Fortunately, she lived long enough to tell her own story. “Death of Innocence” presents a riveting account of the tragedy that upended her life and ultimately the Jim Crow system in the South. Her autobiography offers the fullest portrait available of her beloved son and explains how she coped with the sharpest blow a mother can receive and how she sustained her determination to make sure something “positive” came out of her son’s murder.
Her autobiography is also strikingly candid. She opens up her personal life to full view. She recounts in detail her first two troubled marriages. She acknowledges the demands of being a single parent.
Through all the trying times, she was a survivor. Her friends and family were there to support her. Her mother was a source of strength, and her father, who had left her family when she was a young girl, accompanied her to Money for the murder trial. And in 1957 she married Gene Mobley, who had comforted her during the darkest days, and they were a strong team until he died in 2000.
Above all, Mamie Till-Mobley did not let hatred and bitterness crush her spirit, as her autobiography makes clear. The loss of her son took her to “the brink of desolation,” she says. But she recovered and enrolled in the Chicago Teachers College. In 1960 she earned her degree, and for the next 23 years she taught in Chicago’s public schools, working with young people. Teaching, she writes, “was my passion.”
In 1973, she was asked to organize a black history assembly at her elementary school. She developed a program with young students revolving around the speeches of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. And so were born the Emmett Till Players, who, as they performed over the years (even in Mississippi) kept alive the spirit of the civil rights movement and her son.
By the late 1980s, Mamie Till-Mobley had become something of a first lady of the civil rights movement. In 2000, at the commemorative march of the 35th anniversary of the famous march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., she was at the head of the procession with President Bill Clinton, Coretta Scott King and John Lewis, among others. In a fitting acknowledgment of her role in the struggle for racial equality, Rev. Jesse Jackson wrote the foreword for her autobiography.
After her son’s death in 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley knew no better way to honor him than to use his memory to fight injustice. With this important book, she has helped ensure that the story of her son (and her own story) will not soon be forgotten.