Ten O'Clock News; Mamie Till-Mobley

[Beep] My first reaction was to let the world see what is happening in the United States of America. I wanted the world to see and I knew that I could not tell anybody. But I have seen. It was just too hard. In the summer of 1955, the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till startled the nation. He was in Mississippi on vacation from Chicago visiting relatives, unfamiliar with a Southern code of white supremacy. Till made the mistake of saying "bye, baby" to a white woman as he walked out of this grocery store. Police found his body in the Tallahatchie River a few days later. Do you have any evidence bearing on this case? My son. Mamie Till's determination to see her son's killers brought to justice inspired other blacks to demand their rights. Later that same year 33 years ago Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. became household names

When blacks in Montgomery, Alabama refused to ride segregated city buses. We're not sitting in rocking chairs anymore. I said uh-uh. We are rocking boats now and in fact we're going to turn them over. Rightly so. At 66, Mamie Till Mobley is still outspoken. She and civil rights activist James Farmer were in Boston this week to receive lifetime activism awards from a Massachusetts Senior Citizen Action Group. I... I never thought I'd meet you in person but I think the Lord God... Normally I think someone who might would have just buried their son and forgot about it and went on with their life. But this is one woman who kept going to make the civil rights movement. We must set out to do our life's work so well That nobody could do it better. In Chicago, Till organizes a group called the Emmett Till Players, young people who travel with her to spread the message of the civil rights era through the words of people like Martin Luther King.

Pass along, if I could share somebody with the word of song If I could show somebody that he is traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain. [applause] Tell me why some of the reasons or some of the answers you came up with as to why you, as you describe it, got lost in history. Well, I'm pretty sure that you've heard of The Good The Bad and The Ugly. And nobody wants to deal with the ugly. If the death of my son could mean something to the other unfortunate people all over the world then for him to have died a hero would mean more to me than for him just to have died. Reporting such as in the PBS series Eyes on the Prize has shed more light on Mrs. Till's role in the civil rights struggle. But fame is not what she's seeking.

It is the final outcome that I'm interested in. And I am interested now in someone sparking a movement to get our kids turned around to get them out of this-- off this dope, get them out of these gangs, energize these kids in a positive direction and let's get on with the business of positive thinking and living. For the 10 o'clock news. I'm Marcus Jones.