Starred Review When Mamie Till-Mobley was a child in the 1920s, her family left Mississippi for the relative freedom of the Chicago area. Soon after high school, she married and had a son, Emmett. His father left the family, but she surrounded her child with love and, when he contracted polio, nursed him back to health. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett left Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi, where he was brutally murdered. His body, "bruised / scarred / swollen," was recovered from the river and his mother bravely insisted that the sheriff send his remains home. His body was displayed in an open coffin. Later, after sitting in the courtroom while Emmett's murderers were found "not guilty," she courageously began speaking out against racist violence in lectures credited with significantly moving the twentieth-century civil rights movement forward. Joy's text, written in free verse, tells of Emmett Till's death within the context of his mother's love and her determination to work for racial justice. The powerful, distinctive artwork was cut from sheets of black paper to create distinctive portrayals of people and their surroundings, with layers of tissue paper added to bring color, warmth, and coherence to the pages. A moving, memorable picture book.

This powerful picture-book biography reverently portrays the life of Mamie Till-Mobley (1921-2003), whose defiant act of bravery following the 1955 murder of her son, Emmett, brought a spiritual essence to -- and helped ignite -- the civil rights movement. Joy's (Black Is a Rainbow Color, rev. 1/20) lyrical free-verse narrative opens on August 31, 1955, when "the sheriff set out to dig a grave...to hide the crime in the mud of Mississippi...But Mamie did the harder thing. She said, 'No. You send my son home.'" The text then goes back to Mamie's childhood outside of Chicago, where the family moved from Mississippi during the Great Migration. She excelled in school, graduating at the top of her class, and later married Louis Till. They had a baby, Emmett, whose bout with polio left him with a stutter. One summer, relatives invited Emmett to spend time with them in Mississippi. Mamie said no, fearful of the Jim Crow South. Although she finally agreed, still, "Sometimes a mother gets a feeling, an ache deep down in her soul -- a warning." The heart of the story is what happens following Emmett's brutal murder. Mamie's resolve not to let her son be forgotten leads her to a crusade of social justice and advocacy -- not only for Emmett but for "sons and daughters still living." Washington's dramatic paper-cut art, featuring bold black-and-white silhouettes and figures on brown backgrounds with blue, brown, and red tissue-paper accents, perfectly captures the courage and dignity of the subject. Rich back matter includes author and illustrator notes, a playlist, a timeline, and a bibliography.

In an extraordinary volume, Joy’s cadenced prose and Washington’s dimensional cut-paper artwork portray Mamie Till-Mobley’s (1921–2003) life and efforts seeking justice for the brutal murder of her son Emmett Till (1941–1955). After introducing Till’s death, lines flash back to Till-Mobley’s childhood in small-town Illinois. “The first African American to graduate at the top of her class,” she later experiences an abusive marriage and nurses young Till through polio. Both move for new opportunity in Chicago, but Till misses family and space. Despite “an ache deep down in her soul,” she sends him to visit relatives in Mississippi, and his lynching there, and Till-Mobley’s pursuit of justice, has a galvanizing effect on the civil rights movement. Contextualizing endnotes conclude this necessary title whose reiterative refrain characterizes Till-Mobley’s actions as “the harder thing” and “the braver thing/ that changed everything.” Ages 8–12. (Sept.)