The Funeral That Shook The Consciousness Of The Nation: The Impact Of Emmett Till’s Murder On The Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

The present paper discusses Mamie’s resistance and emergence against the brutality meted out to her teenage son while visiting his cousins and uncles on vacation in Mississippi. The article highlights that an open-casket funeral of Emmett Till turns a docile mother into a tireless racial activist. In addition, it examines the impact of the open (glass-top) casket of Emmett Till in the emergent politics of the black civil rights movement and the abolition of slavery in the United States. In August 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago, visited his family and relatives in Mississippi, where racism was abundant and explicit. Till was accused of wolf-whistling and flirting with Carolyn Bryant, a white shopkeeper. He was abducted from his great uncle Moses Wright’s home in Money at midnight and allegedly murdered by Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, John William Milam. The murderers and the cause of the murder remain mysterious even today. On 2nd September 1955, Emmett’s body was shipped to A. A. Rayner Funeral home, Chicago by train. The casket was delivered closed, with the state seal of Mississippi, and there were directives not to open the casket. Mississippi officials hoped that their seal would conceal the facts behind Till’s murder. When Mamie Till saw the disfigured body of her son, she was resolute to have an open-casket funeral to showcase the brutal violence inflicted on her son’s body and face to the whole world. Mamie Till demanded that the[1] coffin be opened against the directive. Under Mamie’s inclinations, Rayner positioned the body in a glass-topped coffin. Her determination inspired one of the pivotal events in the history of the contemporary civil rights struggle. When Till-Mobley opened the casket, photographer David Jackson of Johnson Publications snapped a shot, published immediately in Jet and the Chicago Defender.  She brought to the attention of the nation the practice of lynching by allowing magazines to publish uncooked images of her son’s corpse. Mamie demands that the country should see not just the wounded body but what Emmett’s lynching holds in the collective memory. The death of Emmett was compared to an earthquake, and Mamie made use of its aftershocks to raise solidarity and consciousness among the blacks about hate crime. It shook the nation’s consciousness and changed its perception of African- Americans in the United States.