Mamie Till

In 2023, a statue of Till-Mobley in a plaza dedicated to her is planned to be unveiled in front of the Argo Community High School, where she graduated as an honor student, in Summit, Illinois.

Whoopi Goldberg announced in 2015 plans for a film called Till, based on Till-Mobley's book and her play, The Face of Emmett Till. Danielle Deadwyler played Till-Mobley, with newcomer Jalyn Hall as Emmett and Goldberg as Alma Carthan. The film, directed by Chinonye Chukwu, was theatrically released on October 14, 2022.

Till-Mobley is portrayed by Adrienne Warren in the six-part 2022 television drama Women of the Movement.

Congress awarded Till-Mobley and Emmett Till a posthumous Congressional Gold Medal in 2022, to be put on display at the National Museum of African American History.

Till-Mobley created the Emmett Till Players, a student group that traveled to deliver works about "hope, determination, and unity." She also founded and chaired the Emmett Till Justice Campaign. The campaign group eventually succeeded in getting enacted into law the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2008" and the "Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act of 2016."

On January 6, 2003, Till-Mobley died of heart failure at the age of 81. Till-Mobley was buried near her son in Burr Oak Cemetery, where her monument reads, "Her pain united a nation."

Till-Mobley coauthored with Christopher Benson her memoir, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America, published by Random House in 2003, almost 50 years after the death of her son. She died a few months before the publication of her book.

Mamie and Gene Mobley remained happily married until Gene's death from a stroke on March 18, 2000.

In 1992, Till-Mobley had the opportunity to listen while Roy Bryant was interviewed about his involvement in her son's murder. With Bryant unaware that Till-Mobley was listening, he asserted that Emmett Till had ruined his life. He expressed no remorse and stated, "Emmett Till is dead. I don't know why he can't just stay dead."

In 1976, she obtained a master's degree in educational administration from Loyola University Chicago.

Till graduated from Chicago Teachers College in 1960 (now Chicago State University, 1971). She married Gene Mobley on June 24, 1957. She became a teacher, changed her surname to Till-Mobley, and continued her life as an activist working to educate people about what happened to her son.

In 1955, when Emmett was 14, his mother put him on the train to spend the summer visiting his cousins in Money, Mississippi. She never saw him alive again. Her son was abducted and brutally murdered on August 28, 1955, after being accused of interacting inappropriately with a white woman. The following month, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam faced trial for Till's kidnapping and murder but were acquitted by the all-white jury after a five-day trial and a 67-minute deliberation. One juror said "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long." Only months later, in an interview with Look magazine in 1956, protected against double jeopardy, Bryant and Milam admitted to killing Emmett Till.

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.

Till-Mobley's activism extended far beyond what she did in the wake of her son's death. However, since her Emmett's death became symbolic of the lynchings of the mid-1950s, she remains most well-known in that context. For this, and all her activism, Till-Mobley was able to use her role as a mother to relate to other people, and gain support for the cause of racial justice.

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 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 sentence was appealed but 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.

Their only child, Emmett, was born nine months later. They separated in 1942 after Mamie found out that he had been unfaithful. Louis later choked her close to unconsciousness, to which she responded by throwing scalding water at him. Eventually, she 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.

At age 18, she 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, she broke off their courtship. But the persistent Till won out, and they married on October 14, 1940. Both were 18 years old.

In 1922, shortly after her birth, her 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.

Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley (born Mamie Elizabeth Carthan; November 23, 1921 – January 6, 2003) was an American educator and activist. She was the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy murdered in Mississippi on August 28, 1955, after accusations that he had whistled at a white woman, a 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 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 millions of African-Americans moved to the Northern United States.