give me a kiss

Photo: Jet Magazine 23 July 1964
Mamie Till Mobley and her son Emmett

Emmett just barely got on that train to Mississippi. We could hear the whistle blowing. As he was running up the steps, I said, "Bo," -- that's what I called him -- "you didn't kiss me. How do I know I'll ever see you again?" He turned around and said, "Oh, Mama." Gently scolding me.

He ran down those steps and gave me a kiss.

Mamie Till Mobley speaking to Studs Terkel about the last time she saw her son Emmett Till alive, as related in Will the Circle be Unbroken.

That moving account, which includes how she identified his body when he returned to her, brutalized by a racial killing, is excerpted here »

The Chicago History Museum has posted the full audio interview here »

Till's coffin, which was buried with him and then disinterred in 2005 for an investigation into his death (he was reburied in a new coffin) was recently found "rotting in a garbage-strewn shed" -- one of only many gruesome discoveries at the Burr Oak Cemetery South of Chicago.

Photos published by Jet Magazine of what a quarter million people saw through Emmett's glass-lidded coffin are here (warning: disturbing content) »

The New York Times reported today that the coffin has been donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C., which is scheduled to open in 2015.

the et cetera of history

He was always concerned with what he called the ‘et cetera’ of history. The people left out.

Historian Howard Zinn speaking of Studs Terkel yesterday at a memorial in his honor at the Great Hall at Cooper Union in New York. The memorial was sponsored by the Nation and the Indypendent.

Yesterday in Chicago while Mr. Zinn spoke in New York, 250 workers occupied their factory, Republic Windows and Doors, on the North side of the city, just off Division -- the long divide that served as the landscape for Mr. Terkel’s first book, Division Street: America.

The factory shut its doors on Friday and laid off its entire workforce with only three days advance notice, rather than the 60 days mandated by Federal law. Workers have been denied the severance and vacation pay that they earned.

The workers have vowed not to leave until things are set right.

Company officials could not be reached for comment, and none were present on the site yesterday where, according to the New York Times, “30 workers sat in folding chairs on the factory floor. ... They came in shifts around the clock. They tidied things. They shoveled snow.”

Et cetera.

speaking of Studs

As you listen
you know in your bones

each person
has never
told their story
as cogently
or as fully
before

and will never
again

That was Terkel's art

He was maestro
of that most precious craft:

Listening

Found in the Guardian's obituary of Studs Terkel who passed away today at the age of 96.

Thank you for listening, Mr. Terkel. It hurts so much to let you go.

thumbs up, with preconditions

I just wish he was more progressive.

Studs Terkel on Barack Obama in the Huffington Post.

I love you, Studs.

Many thanks to @swanksalot for the link.

such a stud.

I have an unseemly affection for Studs Terkel. Ours is a December/May romance: he’s 95. I’m not. Such a storyteller, such an undying curiousity for all that is human.

I’ve seen him three times in the flesh: Once at a Steppenwolf Traffic production about six years back at a staging of readings from his books; again by chance at a book reading here in town when he was shilling his then new book Will the Circle Be Unbroken? when I missed my chance to ask him the question I wanted to ask (Studs: How did you find your calling?), and the last time just as we started our war on Iraq and he read at a protest rally -- an amazing piece of poetry (I wish I wrote it down, I wasn’t able to find it later online, I think it may have been called Fly?) -- in which it sounded like he was reading his own elegy and I thought how withered and small he looked and how soon he would die. And how I would miss him.

But he hasn’t, not yet, thank god, and he’s written new book, a memoir, Touch & Go which I will read with the same aching loving heart with which I read the excerpt that showed up in this Sunday’s Chicago Tribune Magazine (but good luck finding it online -- and if you do post a link back here, because I sure wasn’t able to uncover it).

BTW: Found a marvelous rambling conversation with Studs about Woody Guthrie from a 2004 issue of Gapers Block -- sounds like David Elfving may have recorded it even earlier than that -- give a listen »