Author: Spencer Phillips

In August of 1955, two men abducted Emmett Louis Till from his uncle’s home in Mississippi to torture and murder him before dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River. Till was 14 years old. The men who committed these atrocities justified themselves on the premise that Emmett had flirted with one of the men’s wife, Carolyn Bryant. The men believed that because Emmett was Black and the woman was White that their crimes were valid. While these racist lynchings occurred regularly during the Jim Crow era in America, Till’s murder specifically served as a springboard for the broader Civil Rights Movement that occurred during the 1950s and 1960s because of the advocacy for justice and equality from Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Till-Mobley made the unprecedented choice to hold an open-casket funeral for her badly mutilated son, nationally exposing the inhumanity of racism in Jim Crow America. For the next nearly 50 years of her life, Till-Mobley dedicated herself to perpetuating the Civil Rights Movement so that others might not suffer her same loss. In 1999, Mobley coauthored The Face of Emmett Till with playwright David Barr III to bring to life the story of her son, her loss, and the impact their story had on the trajectory of the Civil Rights Movement in America.