Someone Needs to Tell You This Sickening Sight is Your Son -- Lynched?"

"Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation and had him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered and water-logged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son -- lynched?"
-- Mamie Bradley, mother of Emmett Till

In 1955, Mamie Till was unwillingly thrust into American history. The murder of her son, Emmett, catapulted the quiet Chicago civil service employee into a lifetime of advocacy, starting with seeking justice for the death of her son.In 1955 Mamie decided to take a long-awaited vacation to Nebraska to visit relatives. She wanted her son to go with her. But Emmett was set on joining his cousins and spending the end of the summer in Mississippi. When she put her son on a Southbound train, it was the last time she would see him alive.
When her boy was killed, Mamie turned to the strength of her family and faith. "When I began to make the announcement that Emmett had been found and how he was found, the whole house began to scream and to cry. And that's when I realized that this was a load that I was going to have to carry. I wouldn't get any help carrying this load."
Horrified by the mutilation of her son's body yet determined that it would not happen again, Mamie made a stunning decision -- Emmett would have an open casket funeral. "I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till," she said. Some 50,000 people streamed in to view Emmett's corpse in Chicago, with many people leaving in tears or fainting at the sight and smell of the body. With the international firestorm, the NAACP, black leaders and Mamie were hopeful that Milam and Bryant would at least be punished for kidnapping. On November 9, 1955, a Mississippi grand jury refused to indict Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges. Both men were free. Mamie turned to the federal government for help, to no avail. She also tried to meet with President Dwight Eisenhower, but he refused. And FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote in a memo: "There has been no allegation made that the victim [Emmett Till] has been subjected to the deprivation of any right or privilege which is secured and protected by the Constitution and the laws of the United States..." Thousands of letters protesting the Mississippi verdict poured into the White House. Mamie took her fight to the people and gave speeches to overflowing crowds across the country. Blacks were galvanized. Membership in the NAACP soared. African Americans were angered by Emmett's killing and the injustice, and moved by the loss of an only child to a young mother. Those in the trenches of the civil rights movement realized they had to move their fight boldly to the front lines. In December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus and was arrested for violating Alabama's bus segregation laws. Soon after, a 26-year-old minister, Martin Luther King Jr., called for a city-wide bus boycott. The civil rights movement was officially born.  More than thirty years passed before Emmett Till's story would find renewed national interest, becoming the subject of scholarly research and publication. The boy was the apple of his mother and grandmother's eyes. Aside from a bout with polio at age five, after which Emmett would speak with a mild stutter, he was a healthy and happy boy.