Person · 1921–2003
Mamie Till-Mobley
The mother of Emmett Till, who turned her son's 1955 murder into a national reckoning, "Let the world see what they did to my boy", and spent her life as an educator and activist against racial violence.
Mamie Till-Mobley (1921–2003) was the mother of Emmett Till. After her 14-year-old son was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, she made the decision that transformed private grief into a national reckoning: an open-casket funeral and the publication of photographs of his mutilated body, declaring, "Let the world see what they did to my boy." The images galvanized a generation. She spent the rest of her life as a Chicago educator and an activist against racial violence, keeping her son's story, and the demand for justice, before the public until her death in 2003.