Civil+Rights+-+Emmett+Till

After their wedding, Louis moved in with Mamie, Alma, and Alma’s second husband, Tom Gaines. Mamie was working at Coffey School of Aeronautics as a typist, and Louis was still at Corn Products. By Mamie’s estimation, she conceived their first (and only) child on her first sexual encounter—-her wedding night. As the pregnancy progressed, a family friend nicknamed her unborn child “Bobo.” It stuck, even though Mamie had been favoring the nickname, “Mickey.” After six months of living with the Gaines’s, Louis and Mamie rented their own apartment. No one was happier than Louis, who had come to resent Mamie’s close relationship with Alma. Louis couldn’t really be blamed, as Mamie admits that while living with her mother, she and Louis felt obligated to ask permission even to go to the movies. “Mama’s hold on me had been so strong that I didn’t realize that I was fully grown until I was nineteen years old and had been married for six months.” Louis hoped that with the move would come some independence. But as Mamie discovered, “I was no more prepared for independence than a new-born lamb strayed from its mother.” Consequently, she still turned to Alma for advice and just about everything else. Perhaps because of this, in contrast to his lonely upbringing, when, as an orphan, he was shuffled from place to place, Louis seemed little interested in the coming baby. Or, perhaps he felt out of place. Whatever the reason, he was not present when Mamie gave birth to their child, a boy, who she named after an uncle, Emmett Carthan, and Louis. Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25, 1941, at Cook County Hospital, in Chicago. And he would forever retain the nickname “Bobo,” or simply, “Bo.”
 * Emmett Till ** **﻿ ﻿﻿The following is an excerpt from Devery Anderson's "A Boy Named Emmett" found on [|www.emmetttillmurder.com]. Copyright 2006 **  **  When eighteen year-old Mamie Carthan met Louis Till, a young man three months her junior, and nine inches taller, she was impressed by his sophistication and confidence. Born in Missouri and orphaned, Louis had just recently moved to Argo, Illinois, to work for the Corn Products Refining Company. He was also a part-time boxer and a skilled gambler. Mamie, naïve and sheltered her entire life, hardly resembled Louis’s worldliness and sophistication. Although they began dating, their differences created a dysfunctional relationship between them from the beginning. “He treated me like I was a little girl and took me for granted like [I was] a doll you would sit on a shelf and find it there when you came back,” Mamie said in 1956. Alma Gaines, Mamie’s mother, saw little she admired in Louis, and persuaded Mamie to break up with him. Later, however, after Louis saw Mamie out with another boy, he created such a scene in front of her house that Alma came out and scolded them both. Alma’s actions may have backfired. “I flared up [and told her] that I was grown up and wasn’t a child anymore,” said Mamie. “It was then, I guess, that I made up my mind I was going to marry Louis Till.” The wedding took place in Alma’s living room on October 14, 1940.  **