Mamie Till

Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley (born Mamie Elizabeth Carthan; November 23, 1921 – January 6, 2003) was an American educator and activist.

Born Mamie Elizabeth Carthan on November 23, 1921 in Webb, Mississippi, she was a young child when her family relocated from the Southern United States during the Great Migration, the period when hundreds of thousands of African-Americans moved to the Northern United States.

In 1922, shortly after her birth, Mamie's father, Nash Carthan, moved to Argo, Illinois, near Chicago.

There, he found work at the Argo Corn Products Refining Company.

Alma Carthan joined her husband in January 1924, bringing along two-year-old Mamie and her brother, John.

They settled in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Argo.

When Mamie was 13, her parents divorced.

Devastated, Mamie threw herself into her schoolwork and excelled in her studies.

Alma had high hopes for her only daughter, and although Alma Carthan said that in her day "the girls had one ambition—to get married", she encouraged Mamie in her studies.

Mamie was the first African-American student to make the "A" Honor roll and only the fourth African-American student to graduate from the predominantly white Argo Community High School.

At age 18, Mamie met a young man from New Madrid, Missouri named Louis Till.

Employed by the Argo Corn Company, he was an amateur boxer, who was popular with women.

Her parents disapproved, thinking the charismatic Till was "too sophisticated" for their daughter.

At her mother's insistence, Mamie broke off their courtship.

But the persistent Till won out, and they married on October 14, 1940.

Both were 18 years old.

Their only child, Emmett Louis Till, was born nine months later, on July 25, 1941.

However, they separated in 1942 after Mamie found out that Louis had been unfaithful.

He later choked her close to unconsciousness, to which she responded by throwing scalding water at him.

Eventually, Mamie obtained a restraining order against him.

After Louis violated this repeatedly, a judge forced him to choose between enlistment in the U.S. Army or jail time.

Choosing the former, he joined the Army in 1943.

In 1945, Ms. Till received notice from the War Department that, while serving in Italy, her husband was executed due to "willful misconduct".

Her attempts to learn more were comprehensively blocked by the United States Army bureaucracy.

The full details of Louis Till's criminal charges and execution emerged only ten years later.

He (along with accomplice Fred A. McMurray) had been charged with raping and murdering an Italian woman.

Both men were tried and convicted by a U.S. Army general court-martial and their sentence was death by hanging.

Their sentences were appealed, but the appeals were denied.

Both of their bodies were buried near the First World War U.S. Cemetery located at Oise-Aisne in an area known as Plot E, or the Fifth Field.

Later analysis of the trial by John Edgar Wideman would call Louis Till's guilt into question.

By the early 1950s, Mamie and Emmett had moved to Chicago's South Side.

Mamie met and married "Pink" Bradley, but they divorced two years later.

Mamie worked in the Air Force as a clerk who was in charge of confidential files.

She worked more than 12-hour days and Emmett took care of the home while she was at work.

She was the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old teenager murdered in Mississippi on August 28, 1955, after accusations that he had whistled at a Caucasian grocery store cashier named Carolyn Bryant.

For Emmett's funeral in Chicago, Mamie Till insisted that the casket containing his body be left open, because, in her words, "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby."

Born in Mississippi, Carthan had moved, as a child, with her parents to the Chicago area during the "Great Migration".

After her son's murder, Mamie Till became an educator and activist in the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1955, when Emmett was 14, his mother put him on the train to spend the summer visiting his cousins in Money, Mississippi.

Before Emmett left for the vacation, his mother warned him that Chicago and Mississippi were different, that he would have to act differently, and he should know how to behave in front of whites in the South.