Till: Mother of a Movement

Mamie Till-Mobley might not be a name that is widely recognised but her actions
following the brutal lynching of her 14-year-old son Emmett Till in Mississippi, 1955, caused a seismic cultural shift in the twentieth century and acted as the catalyst for the modern Civil Rights movement.

Mamie was a mother of one and public school teacher who became a revolutionary civil rights figure in the mid-1950s and campaigned until her death in 2003. Her transformation was marked by her resilience in harnessing her grief and anger towards her son’s murderers and the corrupt justice system of the southern states of the USA, which she used to teach the whole world about the impact of racism, inequality and injustice.

There are parallels with the death of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 in London and the activism of his mother Doreen Lawrence, now Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, OBE who kept his image, story and legacy in the public consciousness through media coverage and campaigning against legal injustice.