Ahead of today’s Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC) meeting, candidate images of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Congressional Gold Medal have been released. The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Congressional Gold Medal is to be issued next year.
Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 at the age of 14, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family’s grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the acquittal of his killers drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.
Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley (born Mamie Elizabeth Carthan; November 23, 1921 – January 6, 2003) was an American educator and activist. She was the mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old teenager murdered in Mississippi on August 28, 1955, after accusations that he had whistled at a Caucasian grocery store cashier named Carolyn Bryant. For Emmett’s funeral in Chicago, Mamie Till insisted that the casket containing his body be left open, because, in her words, “I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.”[2]
Born in Mississippi, Carthan had moved, as a child, with her parents to the Chicago area during the “Great Migration”. After her son’s murder, Mamie Till became an educator and activist in the Civil Rights Movement.
