The Long Wait Of Mamie Till Mobley by Charles Bane, Jr.

The Long Wait Of Mamie Till Mobleyby Charles Bane, Jr. | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
On an August afternoon in 1955, Emmett Till and a group of other youngsters were milling around Bryant's Grocery Store in the small town of Money, Mississippi. Fourteen year old Till was not a native of the town. He had arrived in Money from Chicago with his cousin, Curtis Jones, to spend the summer with Jones' s grandfather, Mose Wright.
Accounts vary widely about what took place when Till encountered Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, inside the store she owned with her husband Roy, who was out of town until Saturday. Some witnesses claim that Emmett, on a dare, spoke to her directly with a breezy " Hi , baby."
But Emmett had a speech defect as a result of childhood polio and the stutter made him reticent. Others said that he whistled at the woman, then rushed out the door. But young Till had been raised better than that. He had always been respectful of elders. What is likely is that when Emmett walked into her grocery store, Carolyn Bryant fixed her gaze upon a boy not from her parts, and he did not avert her eyes, as his companions would have done instinctively. It would not have occurred to him to do so. He would have returned Bryant's look with open, inquiring eyes. It threw her into a rage.
If Till was ignorant of the code that governed the precarious relationship between Blacks and whites in the South, Mose Wright was not: when the elder heard a car pull up in front of his modest home late Saturday night, he was instantly alarmed. He stepped out his front door. Roy Bryant and his brother- in - law, J. W. Milam demanded he turn Emmett over. Wright adopted a careful pose:  The boy was not from here, he said. Give him a good whipping right now. A good whipping would set him right. They seized Emmett, forced him into the car, and sped off into the dark.  A few hours later, a boy walking past a remote farm heard screams of pain from a shed on the property. The following morning Bryant and Milam tossed Till's body, like refuse, into the nearby Tallahatchie River.
The murder of her son was a daily image before her when I contacted Mamie Till Mobley in the early 1990's for a series of interviews.  A retired school teacher, she was living quietly in Chicago. Time, as others knew it, had no affect on her. It had ceased to exist. The death of her only child could not have occurred forty years ago.
She had a soft lilting voice; she was diminutive.  This was at odds with the fury she unleashed on the South in the aftermath of Emmet's murder. She demanded that his coffin remain open for four days of public viewing prior to his funeral. She demanded that America look into the coffin and see "what they did to my boy".  Two Americas obeyed her: white America was shocked and repelled. Black America was convulsed in fury; and it was galvanized.
Louis Armstrong, who subscribed to the Chicago Defender in Harlem, was asked by the United States government to be the nation's representative orchestra on a tour of Europe. It was an unheard of recognition. He turned it down, telling a reporter, " The way this country treats my People, it can go to hell."
Mrs. Mobley demanded justice of Mississippi. She got that too, but she got it Mississippi- style.  
Bryant and Milam were charged with first- degree murder and the trial scheduled for late September at the County Courthouse in Sumner.Overnight, $10,000 poured into a defense fund. Prominent attorneys were hired. Under an onslaught of media attention, the South was quickly closing ranks. Black reporters who journeyed to Sumner for the trial were pointed to a small bridge table in the rear, away from the formal courtroom. The victim's mother was also directed to the " n*****r table". There they learned, to their astonishment, that Mose Wright had agreed to testify against the defendants.
Wright later said he could "feel the blood boiling" when he mounted the witness stand. Asked to identify the men who had come to his shanty for Emmett, he pointed at the burly Milam and said, "Thar he". He also identified Bryant. Immediately after his testimony, he was spirited out of the state by its NAACP Field Secretary, Medgar Evers.
No one in the courtroom doubted the foregone conclusion: the jury deliberated a little over an hour before issuing a verdict of "not guilty." But just as Emmett Till  did not comprehend the anger of Carolyn Bryant at their only meeting, it is just as likely that the defendants took no notice, as they exited the courthouse, of the rage left behind among the trial's reporters. They trumpeted the sham in national headlines that, in turn, passed a charge through the burgeoning civil rights movement.
Mrs. Mobley knew that: she watched its unfolding. But that is not the same as justice  which she waited for vainly in the decades that followed the trial. She founded the Emmett Till Foundation. She did not want the public to forget her son's sacrifice, that helped make the movement possible. And she did not forget Roy Bryant.
She pressed for her son's killers indictment, on lesser charges. The outlook was bleak: Milam had died. Bryant's wife divorced him (as of this writing, she is still alive, her whereabouts kept secret by her adult children).  Roy Bryant, who had served a brief sentence for food stamp fraud, was now suffering from heart disease.
In 1991, Mrs. Mobley received a gift from an unlikely source: the state of Mississippi: its legislature enacted a new, tough crime bill to match the public's mood. A provision revoked the statute of limitations in cases of kidnapping involving felonious assault on a child. She dreamed of Bryant in prison.
It was not to be. Bryant died in 1997. A Black state senator introduced a resolution calling for $100,000.00 in reparations to be paid to the Till Foundation. It withered, and disappeared.
Mamie Till Mobley passed away on January 6, 2003, and achieved, finally, her victory. With her death, time resumed as she grasped her son.
http://www.emmetttilllegacyfoundation.com
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Charles Bane, Jr. is a second generation civil rights activist and author of The Chapbook ( Curbside Splendor ) , Love Poems ( Aldrich Press) , and Three Seasons: Writing Donald Hall (  Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University ). He created and contributes to The Meaning Of Poetry series for The Gutenberg Project, and is a current nominee as Poet Laureate of Florida.