Discerning the Dead: How Mamie Till’s Abdication of Privacy Sparked the Civil Rights Movement

Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture featuring Anita L. Allen

Discerning the Dead: How Mamie Till’s Abdication of Privacy Sparked the Civil Rights Movement

Mamie Till-Mobley is praised today for being “courageous”. But was she as ethical as she was courageous? In 1955, a Mississippi funeral home shipped the viciously battered body of her 14-year-old son Emmett back to his Chicago hometown for burial. The boy had been beaten beyond recognition, shot and thrown into the Tallahatchie River in a racist lynching. Till-Mobley chose to hold an open-casket funeral. Under American common law, kin have the right to make decisions about the disposition of loved one’s remains. Emmet’s mother acted within the bounds of discretion the sepulcher laws afforded her; but she took a moral risk in deciding not to shield the desecrated corpse from view. By holding an open-casket funeral, when a respectful privacy for the battered corpse might have been commended, Till-Mobley publicly displayed the “ugly face of racism”. Thousands paid their respects over three days, and now-famous photographs of the open casket of Emmett Till were circulated around the nation. Till-Mobley’s brave and bold choice “was a spark to galvanize the Civil Rights Movement.” In honor of Herma Hill Kay’s pathbreaking contributions to our understanding of the varied challenges of motherhood and the quest for equal rights, I broach the ethical edge of whether displaying the dead and encouraging others look at the dead are ever wrong from a dignitarian ethical point of view. In the case of Till-Mobley, seeing a victim of racism through a mother’s loving eyes de-objectified and re-humanized an innocent child. Today, like seventy years ago, gazing at the racism’s dead and dying—now greatly enabled by technologies of photography, recordation and streaming– is an occasion for moral discernment, potentially prompting sorrow, rage and, ultimately, solidarity.

Anita L. Allen is the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Penn Law School. A graduate of Harvard Law with a PhD from the University of Michigan in Philosophy, Allen is internationally renowned as an expert on philosophical and social justice dimensions of privacy and data protection law; ethics; bioethics; legal philosophy; women’s reproductive rights; and faculty advancement. She was Penn’s Vice Provost for Faculty from 2013-2020 and chaired the Provost’s Arts Advisory Council.

Allen is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Law Institute, the American Philosophical Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018-19 she served as President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. From 2010 to 2017, Allen served on President Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

She has served on the faculty of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell, for which she is an advisor, and served a two-year term as an Associate of the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center, 2016-2018. Allen has been a visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University, Waseda University, Villanova University, Harvard Law, Fordham Law, Yale Law, and a Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton.

She visited the Blavatnik School at Oxford University in 2022; was the University College, Oxford Hart Fellow in 2024; and delivered the H.L.A. Hart Memorial Lecture in 2024.

Allen was awarded an honorary doctorate from Tilburg University (Netherlands) in 2019 and from Wooster College in 2021. She was awarded the 2021 Philip L. Quinn Prize for service to philosophy and philosophers by the American Philosophical Association, the 2022 Founder’s Award by the Hastings Center for service to bioethics, and the 2022 Privacy Award of the Berkeley Law and Technology Center for groundbreaking contributions to privacy and data protection law.

A prolific scholar, Allen has published over 130 articles and chapters, and her books include Unpopular Privacy: What Must We Hide (Oxford, 2011); Privacy Law and Society (Thomson/West, 2017); The New Ethics: A Guided Tour of the 21st Century Moral Landscape (Miramax/Hyperion, 2004); Why Privacy Isn’t Everything: Feminist Reflections on Personal Accountability (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), and Uneasy Access: Privacy of Women in a Free Society (Rowman & Littlefield, 1988).

She has given lectures all over the world, been interviewed widely, and has appeared on television, radio and in major media.

Allen currently serves on the Board of the National Constitution Center, The Future of Privacy Forum and the advisory Board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, whose Lifetime Achievement Award she has received and whose board she has chaired. She has served on numerous other boards, editorial boards and executive committees including for the Pennsylvania Board of Continuing Judicial Education, the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington, the Association of American Law Schools, the Maternity Care Coalition, the Women’s Medical Fund, and the West Philadelphia Alliance for Children.

She is a member of the Pennsylvania and New York bars and formerly taught at Georgetown Law Center and the University of Pittsburgh Law School, after practicing briefly at Cravath, Swaine & Moore and teaching philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University.

At Penn, Allen is a faculty affiliate of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, the Africana Studies Department, the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, the Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition, and the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences.

About the Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture

The Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture was created by a generous seed gift from Professor Pamela Samuelson and her husband Dr. Robert Glushko. The annual lecture honors the iconic pioneer who taught at Berkeley Law for 57 years and was its first female dean. She died in 2017 at age 82.

Herma Hill Kay was a Berkeley Law institution. The school’s second woman faculty member, Herma became a popular professor and renowned scholar of family law, conflicts of law, and sex-based discrimination. A powerful advocate for diversity in legal education and women’s rights, she published numerous articles and book chapters on divorce, adoption, and reproductive rights.