A new statewide day of reflection and remembrance aims to honor the life and legacy of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley.
Gov. JB Pritzker joined legislators and community members Thursday at the location of Emmett Till’s funeral, Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville, to sign legislation designating July 25, Till’s birthday, as a statewide day of reflection and remembrance for Till and his mother.
Till was a Black teenager from Chicago who was abducted, tortured and killed in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at a White woman in Mississippi. Emmett Till was 14 years old.
Following Till’s murder, his mother insisted on an open casket funeral to show his mutilated body. “Let the people see what they did to my boy,” Till-Mobley said at the time. The funeral at Roberts Temple Church in Chicago was attended by thousands of mourners.
It was Till-Mobley’s insistence of an open casket, along with the photos of the funeral published by African American publications Jet Magazine and Chicago Defender, that helped propel the Civil Rights Movement.
Mrs. Till-Mobley died from heart failure in 2003. She was 81.
“If she was here, she’d be one happy soul,” the Rev. Wheeler Parker said about Till-Mobley during Thursday’s event. Parker traveled with his cousin Emmett from Chicago to Mississippi and was with him the night he was abducted. “Time went on and every time I saw his mother, I felt like I had a survivor’s guilt,” Parker said. “I came back and he didn’t come back.”