Mamie Till Quotes

God told me, “I have taken one from you, but I will give you thousands.

With each day, I give thanks for the blessings of life—the blessings of another day and the chance to do something with it. Something good. Something significant. Something helpful. No matter how small it might seem. I want to keep making a difference.

We are only given a certain amount of time to do what we were sent here to do. You don’t have to be around a long time to share the wisdom of a lifetime. You just have to use your time wisely, efficiently. There is no time to waste.

I have left something of myself in all the children I have touched.

Move back,” President Clinton said. “Let this mother through. Don’t you know who this is?

It is not that I dwell on the past. But the past shapes the way we are in the present and the way we will become what we are destined to become. It is only because I have finally understood the past, accepted it, embraced it, that I can fully live in the moment. And hardly a moment goes by when I don’t think about Emmett, and the lessons a son can teach a mother.

That is, after all, how it works. We don’t come here with hatred in our hearts. We have to be taught to feel that way. We have to want to be that way, to please the people who teach us to want to be like them. Strange, to think that people might learn to hate as a way of getting some approval, some acceptance, some love. I thought about all that

prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy. And the thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children and the children yet unborn.…

Strong women don’t merely birth children. They cultivate them to render service.

So I was just sitting in the dining room feeling sorry for myself. “What am I going to do?” Almost as soon as I asked that question, the answer came. “End it all.” Oh, I don’t know what possessed me. I really don’t have any idea at all. But I got up and walked over to a window. Well, that window was painted shut, so I went to another window. That one led out to a gangway, a stairwell, where I figured no one would find me until my body started to smell. No, that wouldn’t do. I looked at the front windows. One was a picture window that didn’t open, but then I couldn’t jump from those windows on the sides, either. Children played out front and that would be so traumatic for them. Besides, after I thought about it a little more, I realized something else that was very important: I wasn’t wearing pants. I didn’t wear pants back then. I was wearing a dress that Mama had made for me. Oh, I remember that dress. It was sleeveless, real tight in the waist with a long flared skirt. It was a white dress, white with a floral pattern, some kind of design in it, and that design was pink. That was one of my favorite dresses. I couldn’t stand the thought of jumping in that dress. More important, I couldn’t stand the thought that my skirt might fly up. Just then, as I was thinking about all that, the phone rang. It was a reporter. He was thinking about doing a follow-up story on me and he wanted to know what I was planning to do. Well, I couldn’t tell him I was planning to jump out the window. So I said I wanted to go back to school and become a teacher. I turned around as if to ask, “Who said that?” Now, I don’t know to this day where it came from, but he said he would take me to register for classes. I mean, he was just going to carry me down to the college and walk me through it. That was fine with me, because I didn’t even know where to go. I hadn’t exactly given this a whole lot of thought. As it turns out, the place to go was Chicago Teachers College. He took me there and, unfortunately, we were told that registration for classes had just closed. Before I even got a chance to start thinking about those windows back home again, he somehow convinced them to admit just one more student, and that’s how it all started. That’s how I was able to start over. I was going to go to college. I was going to become a teacher. I would be able to work with children, to teach them, to help shape them, to introduce them to a whole world of possibilities. In the process, a whole world of possibilities was opening up to me. Throughout my life I have heard a great many stories about how people received the call to their life’s mission. I have to smile when I recall how I received mine. For me, the call came by phone, from a reporter.

We are only given a certain amount of time to do what we were sent here to do. You don’t have to be around a long time to share the wisdom of a lifetime. You just have to use your time wisely, efficiently. There is no time to waste.” —Mamie Till Bradley

but the oast shapes the way we are in the present, and then we will become what we are destined to become

but the past shapes the way we are in the present, and then we will become what we are destined to become

When Gloster Current worried that Mamie might be absent, perhaps due to her recent bout with exhaustion, he instructed organizers to schedule her last on the program and to get donations before her speech. In case she did not show, he reasoned, “you do not have to make the announcement until after you have taken up the collection.”98 That

Medgar Evers certainly felt that way and told his wife, Myrlie, how furious he was that rather than help Mamie, the association “used her” to advance its cause.

For many women of color, the mainstream feminist injunction, "Believe women," and its online correlate, "#Ibelieveher", raise more questions than they settle. Whom are we to believe, the white woman who says she was raped or the black or brown woman who insists that her son is being set up? Carolyn Bryant or Mamie Till?

Two months ago I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the Negroes in the South I said, ‘That’s their business, not mine.’ Now I know how wrong I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of all of us

So often, the boys would all stand under a lamppost "doo-wopping." Everybody wanted to sing. Everybody wanted to sing lead. Nobody could get it just right. It was the only time they were not in harmony. But this was the fifties, and music was in the air. It was everywhere. For this group of boys standing under a curbside spotlight, the music was off-key, it was out of sync, it was perfect. The grace note of their young lives.

Three days later when his body was found they wanted to bury him in Mississippi. I wanted him home in Chicago. I wanted the world to see what they did to my boy. I wanted Emmett's death to be the last death. I wanted Emmett's death to kill American innocence. I wanted Emmett's death to be not only the death of my boy but the death of innocence. I wanted Mississippi, I wanted America, to give us justice. And I prayed that I would live long enough to see it.

As Mamie had taught us all, we each have a purpose in life, something that sets us apart from every other person on the planet. The greatest joy we can experience is finding that purpose, living it.

And I kept screaming, as the cameras kept flashing," [Mamie] wrote, "in one long, explosive moment that would be captured for the morning editions.

[The undertaker] asked if [Mamie] wanted him to retouch Emmett's body and make him look a little more presentable, "No," [she] said. That was the way [she] wanted him presented. "Let the world see what I have seen.

Mamie Bradley’s Untold Story,” published in the spring in both the Daily Defender and Chicago Defender

Denver City Park, local officials unveiled a $110,000, twenty-foot statue designed and cast by Boulder artist Ed Rose. The idea for the sculpture came in 1973 by Herman Hamilton, a Denver bowling alley owner from Money, Mississippi, who was nine years old when Emmett Till was murdered. It depicted Martin Luther King Jr. and Emmett Till standing together. The project had been sponsored by the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Foundation, with a grant from the Colorado Centennial-Bicentennial Commission.14 Till’s August 28, 1955, murder and King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech occurred exactly eight years apart. Mamie

Mamie now envisioned God’s purpose for her life—and for her son’s life: “I took the privacy of my own grief and turned it into a public issue, a political issue, one which set in motion the dynamic force that ultimately led to a generation of social and legal progress for this country.

Mamie now envisioned God’s purpose for her life—and for her son’s life: “I took the privacy of my own grief and turned it into a public issue, a political issue, one which set in motion the dynamic force that ultimately led to a generation of social and legal progress for this country.”32

Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live. —MAMIE ELIZABETH TILL-MOBLEY