God’s magnificent women.
God chooses ordinary people to do extraordinary things when they honor His will and His way. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., contended all cannot be famous because all cannot be well known, but all can be great because all can serve.
The struggle for our emancipation is a history of strong women who by their courage, commitment, and craftiness made America honor her creed of “… life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness …” for all. Magnificent women: Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Constance Baker Motley, Madam C. J. Walker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Gertrude Johnson Williams, mother of John H. Johnson. In that tradition of a high league of service has stood Mamie Till-Mobley. She was an emancipation heroine.
Magnificent women.
Strong women don’t merely birth children. They cultivate them to render service. One example is that of the mother of the Biblical Moses.
When the government’s decree was issued to kill the firstborn babies, she didn’t just cry and pray and hope. She acted. She crafted a plan, made a basket, hid him in the water, floated him toward Pharaoh’s daughter, who, in turn, would become emotionally connected to the baby and adopt Moses. Later, Moses’ mother volunteered to “babysit” her own baby.
Magnificent women who made a difference.
Mother Mary traveled by donkey to Bethlehem, and gave birth outdoors in a stable. When King Herod was frustrated that he couldn’t find Baby Jesus, he ordered all firstborn babies killed. The impression is that most mothers wept and wailed. Mary was so committed to Jesus she traveled to Africa to hide Him. Likewise, Gertrude Johnson Williams said to her son John, the dreamer, “I will give you all I have; my prayers, my love, my five hundred dollars, and put my furniture in hock.” Women of faith are courageous, committed, and crafty.
All these women went beyond giving birth, all the way to magnificent action. Mamie lost her only son so that we might have salvation. She planned to be a mother, yet she became a freedom fighter. In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education broke the legal back of segregation. But the murder of Emmett Till broke the emotional back of segregation. Emmett’s death—and Mamie’s life—gave us the backbone to resist racism.
The 1954 legal victory changed the assumptions of our lives, but hardly our emotional mind-set. I remember in 1954 my grandparents trying to describe what integration meant, because the law had changed, but nothing around us had changed.
On August 28, 1955, when Emmett Till was killed, unlike with Brown there was no need for definition. It shook the consciousness of a nation. It touched our bone marrow, the DNA of our dignity.
People tend to want to cover up a lynching. But Mamie put the struggle for emancipation and her outrage above personal privacy and pride. She allowed the distorted, water-marked body from the Tallahatchie River to be displayed in an open casket, at that time the largest single civil rights demonstration. More than 100,000 demonstrated their disgust at that casket. Each one of those people who saw how her son was defaced left telling their own story. They were never the same again. Mamie’s courage unsettled people of conscience into action.
Mamie empowered the media to nationalize the lynching. Jet magazine exploded, and the tragedy became the Chicago Defender’s finest hour. It was an earthquake and Mamie used the aftershocks of that earthquake to awaken, to transform a people, and to redirect our course. Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955; Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957; Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 are aftershocks of the murder of Emmett Till and the genius of his mother.
We often think of the modern civil rights movement as beginning in Montgomery in 1955 because of the dramatic arrest of Rosa Parks and the emergence of Dr. King. But that is not so. There is a scientific theory that the earth was born through the big bang. One could make the case that Emmett Till was “the big bang,” the Tallahatchie River was “the big bang” of the civil rights movement.
When Ms. Parks was asked “Why did you not go to the back of the bus after such threats?” she said she thought of Emmett Till and said she couldn’t go to the back.
Usually death stops everything. That is the calculation of the enemy. But here, death started everything. The murderers of Emmett Till miscalculated the power of people who have faith in God. People of faith are convinced and are able to say, “Though you slay me yet will I trust you, God.” The enemy puts faith in death. They feel death can protect their tyranny. If Pontius Pilate and the Roman government had known the power of the resurrection beyond the crucifixion they would have gone another way. If they had known when they lifted Him up on the cross that He would draw men unto Him, they would not have chosen state-sponsored murder, resulting in a religious movement known as Christianity.
If the men who killed Emmett Till had known his body would free a people, they would have let him live.
God had the last answer. Even death cannot stop our God. Mamie turned a crucifixion into a resurrection. Well done, Mamie, well done. You turned death into living. Well done. You awakened the world. Well done. You gave your son so a nation might be saved. Well done.
A magnificent woman.
REVEREND JESSE L. JACKSON, SR.
Chicago
January 11, 2003