A Tale of Two Mamies: Mamie Eisenhower and Mamie Till-Mobley

Mamie Eisenhower in 1911, at fifteen — one year older than Emmett Till was when he was killed, decades later. Eisenhower Presidential Library.

Two Americas

America's promise of equality and opportunity was not open to all. Two women named Mamie lived very different versions of the American dream in the mid-20th century — until their paths met after the murder of Emmett Till on August 28, 1955.

Mamie Doud Eisenhower

• Born: November 14, 1896, Boone, Iowa — the last First Lady born in the nineteenth century.
• Childhood: her family moved to Denver when she was seven; her father, a successful meatpacking executive, retired at thirty-six. She grew up wealthy, with etiquette classes and finishing school.
• Marriage: she met Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower in San Antonio in fall 1915 and married him in July 1916.
• Army wife: she followed his career around the country and the world, using her gifts as a hostess to help him rise.
• First Lady: Ike entered politics in 1952 and was inaugurated in January 1953. In 1955 the couple were finishing their Gettysburg farm and home.

Mamie Carthan Till-Mobley

• Born: November 23, 1921, Webb, Mississippi. At two, her family moved to Argo, Illinois in the Great Migration; summer visits to Mississippi taught her how brutal Southern racism could be.
• School: the first Black student on the "A" honor roll and the fourth Black graduate of mostly white Argo Community High School.
• Family: at 18 she married Louis Till; their only child, Emmett, was born in 1941. She suffered domestic violence and got a restraining order. After Louis Till died overseas in 1945, she worked long hours as a secretary in Argo and Chicago, raising Emmett alone.
• Later marriages: briefly to "Pink" Bradley — divorced two years later after more abuse — and in 1957 to Gene Mobley, becoming Till-Mobley.

Summer 1955

Mamie reluctantly let Emmett visit family in Money, Mississippi. She coached him on surviving the Deep South; in her book Death of Innocence she wrote of struggling to "give a crash course in hatred to a boy who has only ever known love."

• A white woman, Carolyn Bryant, accused Emmett of advances in her family's grocery store.
• August 28: her husband Roy Bryant and her brother-in-law J.W. Milam kidnapped Emmett from his great-uncle's house, tortured and murdered him, and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. It was found on August 31.
• September 1: Till-Mobley telegrammed the White House, pleading for Ike to "personally see that justice is meted out to all persons involved in the beastly lynching of my son..." It ended: "Awaiting a direct reply from you." None ever came.
• September 3: she held an open-casket funeral, so the whole world could see what had been done to her son.

The silence

Both families knew the loss of a first son: the Eisenhowers lost Doud "Ikky" Dwight to scarlet fever in 1921, a wound that never healed — during WWII, Ike wrote to Mamie that they might have been grandparents by then. They would have understood something of Till-Mobley's grief. Yet neither spoke about Emmett's murder, to condemn the killers or comfort his mother. According to Christopher D. Benson, board president of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Institute, Till-Mobley was heartbroken at being ignored.

She wasn't alone: a January 6, 1956 White House memo counted 3,000 wires, letters and telegrams to Ike about the case, and petitions carrying 11,000 names.

• Ike and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover declined a federal investigation, leaving the case to Mississippi.
• In September 1955, an all-white jury acquitted the killers. Protected by double jeopardy, they admitted the murder in 1956.
• In 2017, Carolyn Bryant Donham admitted she had lied under oath about Emmett's words and touch.

Emmett died for the crime of being Black in Mississippi.

Two legacies

• Till-Mobley became a leading civil rights voice, touring with the NAACP. Her insistence on the open casket and on naming her son's murder as racial hatred helped spark the modern civil rights movement. She studied at Chicago Teachers College and Loyola University, earning a master's in the 1970s, and taught elementary school for two decades.
• Mamie Eisenhower served through Ike's second term and retired to the Gettysburg farm in 1961.

Today both women's stories are told by the National Park Service: at Eisenhower National Historic Site in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and at the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Chicago, and in Glendora and Sumner, Mississippi. The two Mamies' paths cross once more, in stories of silence and of speaking out that still shape the country.

Sources

Based on "A Tale of Two Mamies," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article's photograph of Emmett Till with his mother, credited to the Library of Congress, is not reproduced here because its rights status was not established.