Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, has been honored with a statue at her Chicago high school.
Argo Community High School unveiled the statue on Saturday, alongside the Emmett Till Memorial Walkway. The statue was sculpted out of 850 pounds of clay by Sonja Henderson, who had been working on the project since 2021.
“Mamie Till-Mobley’s bravery was felt and is still felt across the nation. She personalized strength and action and showed up,” Illinois state Sen. Kimberly Lightford said at the unveiling, via CBS.
Till was a 14-year-old boy lynched in 1955 after allegedly flirting with a White woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, in a convenience store. In response, her husband Roy Bryant and his friend J.W. Milam later took Till from his bed and forced him into the back of a pickup truck. They viciously beat him before shooting him in the head and throwing his body into the Tallahatchie River.
Both were acquitted in the following murder trial, and directly after sold a detailed account of how they committed the murder to journalists. Till-Mobley's decision to have an open-casket funeral, revealing the horrible injuries her son endured, is often credited as the initial spark that ignited the civil rights movement. She died in 2003.
Last October, Till was honored with a statue near the site of his murder in Mississippi. In December, both Till and Till-Mobley were posthumously bestowed the Congressional Medal of Honor to be displayed in the National Museum of African American History alongside Till's casket. Illinois Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth has also introduced legislation to designate the church where Till’s funeral was held as a national monument.
Just last week, Carolyn Bryant Donham died at the age of 88. She had admitted to fabricating the incident in 2007, but grand juries refused to indict her for her culpability in Till's kidnapping and murder despite lawsuits from Till's living relatives.
