Black folks passing by saw them through the window and flocked inside, making themselves at home in the other booths. It was Mamie’s first-ever date and first-ever banana split, and she was shocked at her future husband’s insistence that they eat their ice cream at a booth inside the drug store, rather than taking it outside. On her first date with Louis Till, they integrated their local drugstore. Mamie was practically considered an old maid for waiting until she was nearly 19 to marry Louis Till. Most of the girls in her class dropped out to get married by the time they were 16. She loved school, particularly poetry, and worked hard to maintain her status as an A student. Mamie was only the fourth Black student to graduate from her high school. Mamie was the first Black student to make the honor roll at her high school. camera icon Dave Mann/Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture 3. Carthan is raising her hand in prayer as his casket is lowered. Mamie Till-Mobley (then Mamie Bradley, center) with her mother Alma Carthan (right) at Emmett Till’s graveside. She was one of the few people in the neighborhood with a telephone, and she shared it with everyone ― even leaving a key under the mat and a container for folks to leave nickels if they stopped by to use the phone. Carthan helped folks adjust and find jobs and “gave them every reason to look forward, never back.” Between 19, half a million Black Americans moved to Chicago, more than doubling the city’s Black population, and Mamie’s town was a tiny microcosm of that change.Ĭarthan’s house was a center of the community, part social center, part meetinghouse, part job fair and part church. Mamie’s family called their Chicago suburb “Little Mississippi” and thought of her mother Alma Carthan’s house as the Ellis Island of Chicago. Her mother’s house was a gathering place for Black people who left the South in search of a new life. She wrote, “In Mississippi, there were certain things that black people were denied by white people. ” For the first time, she appreciated the liberty she enjoyed back in Chicago. According to her autobiography, “he pounded the fear of every black person in the state of Mississippi into. Mamie was preparing to say something when her grandfather walked in and escorted her out. She went to the local white-owned drugstore to buy them some real toilet paper, but the owner refused to sell her any, suggesting they use corncobs like everyone else. On a family trip from Chicago to Mississippi when she was 12, Mamie noticed that her grandparents used the Sears, Roebuck, & Co. Is it time for a national park that recognizes him and tells the story of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi? See more ›
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