Colloquium: A Praxis of Black Maternal Grief: Radical Collapse at Emmett’s Wake

Emmett Till. Though he lived only fourteen years, the image of his mutilated body, dressed in a suit while lying in a satin-lined coffin, has haunted the nation for over sixty years. Many credit his mother’s, Mamie Till Bradley, insistence on holding an open-casket funeral and allowing media outlets to photograph and circulate the image of her son in order to reveal the viciousness of American racism. In this talk, however, I focus on another point of significance in Bradley’s choice to hold an open-casket: that being the wake, held for four days in Chicago, where an estimated fifty thousand black people came to view and mourn Emmett. By focusing on the wake, I argue that Bradley occasioned a performative event that not only revealed her son’s body as evidence of racism, but provided a space for black women to experience grief and vulnerability. Against popular notions that view black people, especially women, as excessive in their displays of grief, I, instead, analyze it as part of a choreographic archive that marks particular modes of black women’s bodily vernacular. Among the thousands of visitors who viewed the body, an estimated one in five fainted once they approached the coffin. Many others had to be ushered away as they convulsed, shouted, and moaned. I assert that the buckling of knees, musculature going limp, moans, and screams are forms of, what I call, black radical collapse that provide insight into black women’s performances of resistance in public discourse and private encounters.