Grief Capital, Grief Activism: The Brief Life of Mamie Till Bradley’s NAACP Tour

In 1955, Mamie Till Bradley spoke throughout the country on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to bring justice to her recently murdered son, Emmett Till. While most scholarship focuses on Bradley’s choice to publicize her son’s mutilated body, I analyze her understudied NAACP-sponsored grief tour and her ensuing public fallout with the organization. Focusing on her attempts to create an infrastructure of care and compensation for herself, I forward the concept of grief capital to demonstrate how Black women and institutions make decisions based on the financial substrates of Black maternal grief.