Let the World See

The night they brought Emmett's body back from Mississippi,

everybody came out to the house.

It was late.

Me and my sister were both in bed,

but there was a commotion outside,

and we wondered what the heck was going on.

So me and my sister crept out through our room,

went to the top of the stairs.

Uncle Hosey was down there, and he was talking.

I never heard his voice sound like that before.

We knew something terrible had happened.

We just couldn't understand what it was.

We crept back into the bedroom, and we didn't go to sleep,

but we did go back to bed.

We kind of talked to say, "Bobo's not coming back.

Bobo's dead."

We knew that.

When George Floyd's daughter said,

"My daddy changed the world," it all came back.

It was about the same feeling I had that night

I listened at the top of the stairs,

and I had to leave the room.

Daddy changed the world.

Your daddy did change the world.

You don't know how much your dad changed the world.

I don't really talk about it a lot,

'cause... because I do cry.

'Cause I don't believe

that I had ever seen any grief or any suffering in my family

that we had to experience during that time.

So it took a very strong woman

to be able to rise up to that occasion

and to go and receive the body

at Rayner's Funeral Home.

Mrs. Till said that she had to do

what she called a personal autopsy.

She had to see every inch of the child's body.

She started at his ankles and went to his midsection,

his face where he had a perfect nose,

hazel green eyes, beautiful teeth.

She took much pride in Emmett's teeth

'cause she said his teeth was perfect.

They were all knocked out.

And she said, "Look like they took a hatchet

and just shaved the front of his face off."

As I hear, he had a hole in his...

from one side of the head to the other.

And she could see clean through to the other side of his head.

She goes, "Well, my God, they had shot him.

Did they have to do... Did they have to torture him this way?

This-this-this-this monster, this is what they have done to my child."

When Mr. Rayner asked me,

he said, "Mrs. Mobley, that's the undertaker.

Do you want me to retouch the body?"

I said, "No, Mr. Rayner, let the people see what I have seen.

I want the world to see what is going on in Mississippi

in this great old United States of America."

Hundreds, if not thousands, of people showed up for the funeral.

And not only to show support to her,

but to see Emmett, and to pay respect to him,

and to see what had happened to him.

Deciding to have not just an open casket funeral

but a public open casket funeral,

she was making a statement.

Mamie Till-Mobley understood

if people see what happened to that poor boy,

they will see the depth of barbarity.

To honor Mamie Till-Mobley's wishes

that the world would see what happened to her son,

A.A. Rayner, as a mortician, took risks by choosing to break the seal,

which meant that he was breaking a contract with the state of Mississippi

and going against the policies that he was meant to... supposed to follow

by putting a glass encasing over

so that the body would be properly respected and preserved,

but nevertheless viewed,

and by hanging photographs within the casket itself.

I mean, there are burial rituals

that were modified in this moment for a very political purpose.

I was at the funeral, but I wasn't myself.

I was in a state of shock.

All I can remember is kind of being numb,

and I had no remorse, no sadness, no sorrow,

because we believed that we could see each other again.

I said, "That is not Emmett."

I was in a state of shock. I said, "I'm gonna see him again."

His body was so defaced, it was transformative in its power.

People who saw his body

came out different than when they went in.

And it can be argued that really,

the modern civil rights movement

began with an open casket of a disfigured,

brutally beaten boy laying down.

I understood now that this was about more than Emmett.

People had to face my son and realize just how twisted,

how distorted, how terrifying race hatred could be.

They would have to see their own responsibility

and pushing for an end to this evil.

Simeon Booker, who was quite an extraordinary journalist,

was able to convince Mamie to have Emmett's remains photographed.

And he brought in David Jackson, a Jet magazine photographer,

to photograph Emmett.

And that's the record that was produced of Emmett's condition

when he was returned.

She did more than just show what happened to Emmett.

She put a visualization to lynching.

I saw the picture first in Jet magazine

and suddenly realized that I was not immortal.

And he was exactly like me, my age, my color.

So why couldn't something horrible like that happen to me?

I couldn't believe a human body had become that

and the hatred that caused that.

Me seeing that picture of Emmett Till was the impetus

for me actually feeling like,

"You got to do something purposeful."

I, like every Black kid in the city

and probably in the nation,

learned about that story as part of history.

But the realness of it was understood.

It was the story of what could happen to a young Black man

caught in the wrong place at the wrong time,

saying the wrong thing.

If they say a picture is worth 1,000 words,

an image like that is worth a million lives.

To see what the disfiguring consequence of white supremacy can do.

But neither a Mamie Till-Mobley or anybody else

could ever imagine the outsized implications

of how it would transform America.

On Tuesday, September 6th,

the day we buried Emmett at Burr Oak Cemetery,

the Tallahatchie Grand Jury sitting in Sumner, Mississippi,

indicted Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam for Emmett's murder.

I told reporters that I was ready to give my life

to make sure that what had happened to Emmett

would never happen to anyone else.

I meant those words.

Mamie had to brave the racial hostility

that she knew she was gonna face in Mississippi

to go down to tell the truth, to go down to seek justice in this case.

As I was driving here to Mississippi today...

I thought about...

"Who paved this road?"

Not physically,

but who paved it with their courage

and insight and commitment?

Mamie Till-Mobley was one of them.

It's my opinion that the guilt begins with Mrs. Bryant,

and I want to see Mrs. Bryant punished, her husband,

and any other persons that were in on this thing.

Mamie Till-Mobley has to be, basically smuggled into Mississippi

because if they find out where she's going or who she is,

her life is at risk.

Getting us there was almost like traveling

the Underground Railroad in reverse,

with conductors and safe houses along the way.

The word was that some officials would pass along

license plate numbers to Ku Klux Klan members

who would lay in wait on dark, lonely roads.

She came down here knowing that they were gonna get away with it.

She had to.

The two men admitted kidnapping Emmett.

So they were already in jail in Greenwood for the kidnapping.

But they said that when they took Emmett to Bryant's wife,

she said he wasn't the boy that had insulted her,

so they let him go, and told him to go back home.

I was ready to testify that I knew my son,

that I had recognized him, identified him,

maybe even in Mississippi, there would be 12 people

who would consider the testimony of a grieving mother.

Every lawyer in this county, from what I understand,

volunteered to defend Milam and Bryant.

All five lawyers joined together to be the defense team

and two of them, especially, were friends of ours,

and it just infuriated me, because to me,

that was saying to the whole world that every white person,

at least in Sumner, was...

was defending these two men for this horrible crime.

I remember how there were little jars in stores

where people could give... put in money

for the Milam and Bryant Defense Fund.

I think that most people thought that they had killed him.

I think most people thought that they would not be convicted for it.

My father was one of the three lawyers that prosecuted

Mr. Milam and Mr. Bryant for murdering Emmett Till.

I grew up in a little town of Ripley, Mississippi.

I was seven years old,

and I remember my mother being very, very scared

and uncertain about what was going on.

They were going to turn the murder of my son

into a case of self-defense.

Defense of the Mississippi way of life.

It was all-white male jury back in those days.

A jury is made up of registered voters,

and Mississippi had gone out of its way through violence

to remove all of the Black registered voters.

So Black people were kept out of the jury pools.

It was also understood that an all-white male jury

had the social responsibility to return a verdict

that would fall in line with the mores of Southern life.

Most white men had white women on a pedestal.

And that you must protect white women from Black men.