An unusually crisp summer breeze greeted Deborah Watts as she pulled up to a sprawling dirt patch on North 29th Street in Omaha. Gone were the remnants of her childhood home, including the swing. Her grandfather made it so big and sturdy that eight kids could fit on it.
The Minnesota resident tries to return to her hometown every few years for Native Omaha Days. Many of those childhood memories, she said during a July visit, stay with her to this day.
Among Watts’ hazy recollections: A night 70 years ago when her cousin, Mamie Till Mobley, turned grief into action from a lectern in an Omaha hotel ballroom. The family returned home and as the conversation turned serious, Watts, who wasn’t quite 3, was sent off for a nap. (Correction: This story incorrectly stated the relationship between Deborah Watts and Mamie Till Mobley. Till Mobley was Watts’ cousin.)
Several pamphlets lay on the bed. She thumbed through one and came to a picture of her cousin’s son, Emmett Till, lying in a casket — his face horrifically disfigured.
“It frightened me. … I tore up three or four pamphlets,” Watts remembered.
Watts had no way of knowing then, but her 14-year-old relative’s brutal killing at the hands of two white men in Mississippi became a linchpin in the country’s simmering Civil Rights Movement.
It nearly never happened.
Mamie and her son Emmett Till were going to drive their new ’55 red Plymouth from Chicago to pick up a cousin in Detroit, and then to visit family in Omaha in August 1955. That was the plan.
Then relatives from Mississippi visited them in Chicago for a funeral. Emmett changed his mind and wanted to visit his teenage cousins in the Delta. Mamie never saw him alive again.
On Aug. 28, 1955, Emmett was kidnapped from his uncle’s home, tortured and shot dead. A white woman working at a corner store had alleged he made sexually forward comments toward her through his speech impediment, culminating in a whistle.
Despite evidence contradicting her claims, her husband and his half-brother killed Till. Two young fishermen found Till’s disfigured body in the Tallahatchie River three days later. A 70-pound cotton gin fan was tied around his neck with barbed wire.
That fateful deviation from a planned trip to Omaha galvanized family members in Nebraska to carry Emmett’s legacy forward.
“In the context of his story, she (Watts) is kind of the part because she has direct contact with Omaha and she has been … a flagbearer for his legacy and memory and story for years,” said Preston Love Jr., a longtime North Omaha activist. “For, I’d say, 20 years she’s been traveling the country and trying not to let the country, and all the pieces of this country, forget the story and understand the story.”
Love, who teaches a course on the Black experience in politics at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, noted the context leading to Till’s tragic story.
African American families, seeking economic opportunity and to escape racial tension, fled the South in droves early in the 20th century.
That’s what led Mamie Till’s immediate family to move from Mississippi to the Chicago area when she was 2. Some relatives on her mother’s side moved to Omaha, which emerged as a sought-after destination thanks largely to the cattle industry.
By 1920, Omaha’s Black population surpassed 10,000, second only to Los Angeles among new Western cities. But it didn’t happen without conflict.
White men, triggered by fabricated reports of Black men attacking white women, rioted in downtown Omaha on Sept. 28, 1919. Newspapers reported 10,000 gathered at the Douglas County Courthouse, eventually setting it on fire and beating every nearby Black person.
According to the Omaha Bee, the mob stormed the top floor of the courthouse to reach Will Brown, who was charged with assaulting a white woman. They hanged him from a pole on the south side of the courthouse and dragged him behind a car to 17th and Dodge streets, where his body was burned.
Brown’s slaying and Till’s 36 years later were far from isolated incidents, said JoAnna LeFlore-Ejike, executive director of the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation. She pointed to the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, as another mobilizing tragedy.
“When people are confronted with violence every day and it’s because of the color of your skin, you have two options,” LeFlore-Ejike said. “You can turn inward and deal with anger and kind of recluse yourself from the world, and maybe it turns into depression or other forms of self-soothing your pain.
“Or you do what Malcolm did. Or what (Malcolm’s father) Earl Little did. They came here and started speaking out about it.”
Mamie Till Mobley made the same decision. She sat in the Tallahatchie County Courthouse during the five-day trial of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who were accused of killing her son. She watched as an all-white jury declared them not guilty, prompting Bryant to light a victory cigar in the courtroom. The two later confessed that they had tortured and killed Emmett.
The State of Mississippi didn’t want to send Emmett Till’s body to Chicago, acquiescing only if A.A. Rayner Funeral Home pledged to not allow a public viewing. The mortician only broke that vow at the emphatic request of a mother on a mission.
Her only child loved musician Bo Diddley. He dreamed of playing baseball or being a motorcycle police officer. Now he was dead, and she wanted the world to see what hate did to him.
The Associated Press reported that 2,500 attended the Chicago funeral. One of them was Ernest Withers, whose photo of the open casket was published in Jet and Ebony magazines, then in newspapers across the country, exposing the nation to what happened.
Rosa Parks told Till Mobley that she thought of Emmett when she refused to give up her seat.
“She rung the alarm,” LeFlore-Ejike said. “And that takes a lot of courage as a mother, too.”
Till Mobley toured the country as a guest speaker with the NAACP. Less than a month after the trial ended, she landed in Des Moines and headed toward Omaha.
She told an overflow crowd at Zion Baptist Church that her son did not “die in vain.” She pleaded for the audience to pressure congressmen and senators to pass anti-lynching laws.
Behind her on the rostrum were Omaha Star founder Mildred Brown, Omaha Public Schools trailblazer Eugene Skinner, NAACP president E.T. Streeter, Till Mobley’s stepsister Mary Ann Washington, her father John Carthon and cousin Doris Barbary — who Deborah Watts lived with in the now-long-gone house on North 29th Street.
The determined mother delivered a similar speech at the Hotel Fontenelle on her trip. Watts was too young to understand what she watched from the back of the ballroom. But she built an incredible bond with her cousin, whom Watts referred to as her aunt, as she grew up.
The two talked about how best to preserve Emmett’s legacy.
“I wish you could move to Chicago with me,” Till Mobley told her. Watts would say she would if she didn’t still have family in Omaha.
In 1998, Watts wrote a book titled “101 Ways to Know You’re Black In Corporate America,” a self-described painfully humorous book about the Black experience in the corporate setting. Till Mobley wrote the book’s forward. “The Death of Innocence,” Till Mobley’s book about her son’s death, published five years later, just after her death.
“Her courage was what motivated me,” Watts said. “She is my personal she-ro.”
Surviving Till family members started the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation in 2005. Watts holds various leadership roles with the organization, which is planning a full agenda for the 70th anniversary of Till’s slaying.
They’ve advocated for the government to claim important locations in the Till case as national monuments, which President Joe Biden did in 2023. The foundation has also carried on a mission of education that meant so much to Mamie Till Mobley.
“She laid the blueprint for mothers who lost sons or daughters,” Watts said. “She made sure that our country would bear witness to the kind of hatred that she faced.”
Two years ago, Omaha’s Malcolm X Memorial Foundation hosted a screening of “Till,” a movie based on Emmett Till’s life. They’ve worked together to share a common message: Education.
LeFlore-Ejike equated Till Mobley’s decision to open the casket and show the world her son to how Malcolm X would use verifiable information to inspire others to educate themselves. She thought about how Omahans don’t always feel they have anything to brag about.
“We all need some sort of reassurance that the greatness can come from the same dirt that we were born in,” she said.
A half mile away from the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation sits the empty lot where Watts grew up. It’s where a family once put their hurt into action — a mission that Watts continues to this day.
“We took upon ourselves the opportunity after (Mamie Till Mobley) passed to move forward, making sure Emmett’s death was not in vain. … We want to make sure Emmett’s place in history is still relevant today,” she said. “The place in history and fight for justice is still relevant today.”
