Statue honoring Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, unveiled near Chicago

A statue honoring Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, was unveiled at a public high school near Chicago on Saturday.

Till-Mobley’s alma mater, Argo Community High School, unveiled the statue of her on Saturday, as well as the Emmett Till Memorial Walkway. CBS Chicago News reported that the statue was built by artist Sonja Henderson, who started to sculpt the 850-pound statue from clay in 2021.

“Mamie Till-Mobley’s bravery was felt and is still felt across the nation. She personalized strength and action and showed up,” Illinois state Sen. Kimberly Lightford said at the ceremony, CBS reported.

Emmett Till was 14-years-old in August 1955 during a family visit in Mississippi when a white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, accused him of propositioning her at the store her husband owned. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother J.W. Milam later kidnapped Till, where they tortured him and killed him, a crime that they later admitted to committing after an all-white jury acquitted the pair.

Till-Mobley emerged as a prominent figure in the civil rights movement after Till’s death. Her son’s body was so severely disfigured from being beaten that he was nearly unrecognizable, but Till-Mobley insisted on having an open-casket funeral, where thousands of attendees saw what happened to her son and news photographs of the open-casket circled the nation, sparking another wave of the civil rights movement.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) introduced legislation earlier this year to designate the church where Till’s funeral was held as a national monument, nearly 70 years after his death. Both Till and his mother were honored posthumously with a Congressional Gold Medal last year, with Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) crediting Till-Mobley’s bravery with igniting the civil rights movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Donham, who later admitted to fabricating the incident in 2007, died last week in Lousiania at 88 years old. She was never indicted in connection to the incident, as a grand jury last year declined to indict her on kidnapping and manslaughter charges in relation to Till’s death.