JACKSON, Miss.—Priscilla Till left Mississippi in January 2003, bearing the cold Chicago weather to attend the funeral of her 81-year-old aunt, Mamie Till-Mobley.
The plaque by Till-Mobley’s grave reads “her pain united a nation,” paying homage to the work she did in the Civil Rights Movement after her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till, was killed while visiting relatives in Mississippi in August 1955. Roy Bryant and J.W. Miliam kidnapped and lynched the teenager after Bryant’s wife, Carolyn Bryant, accused Till of making advances toward her.
Her lifelong work, alongside her family’s continued persistence, eventually lead to the Emmett Till Antilynching Act being signed into law in 2022. Their family was still asking for Carolyn Bryant, who was long accused of being directly involved in the lynching, to be criminally prosecuted up until her death in 2023.
Priscilla slept in Till-Mobley’s bed the night following her funeral.
The next day, she reckoned with a modern suspected lynching in her home state herself for the first time.
“Someone called me and said, “Hey, look, they just found this man hung in Kemper County,” Till recounted at a campaign event on Oct. 2.
It was time for Till to pick up her aunt’s fight.
In 2003, Nick Naylor, 23, was found 11 miles from his home, hanging in a tree from a dog leash after leaving for a walk.
After that call, she returned home and headed out to Kemper County to support the Naylor family and bring in help from out-of-state, she said.
Twenty-three years later, Till announced she is running for Mississippi governor in the 2027 election at the Justice Conference at Jackson State University on Oct. 2.
Till previously ran to be the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, but lost the primary to Scott Colom in March.
Priscilla Till is both a teacher and a civil rights activist. Her campaign platform promises to align K-12, college and apprenticeship pipelines with jobs, and treat special education and adult learning as essential.
Till is also calling to expand Medicaid in the state, using federal funding to keep rural hospitals open, and investing in maternal and mental health care. Several of Mississippi’s rural hospitals have closed in recent years, and the state has some of the worst birth outcomes in the nation, surpassed only by Tennessee and Lousianna.
Her campaign announcement comes in light of increasing concerns that the deaths of several Black individuals are racially motivated and are not being properly investigated by Mississippi law enforcement and law enforcement across the country. Sixty members of Congress wrote a letter to the Department of Justice and FBI demanding investigations into the cases in September, which noted the increasing number of Black people being found hanging from trees and asking federal investigators to use Emmett Till Antilynching Act’s authority.
Much of Till’s Oct. 2 speech focused on justice reform and confronting white supremacy in the state, describing the ideology as “demonic.”
She referenced Mississippi’s past funding of the Klu Klux Klan’s Citizens’ Council through the state’s Sovereignty Commission, founded the year following the lynching of Till’s 14-year-old cousin, alongside other historic details. She also read part of a list of Mississippi hate group chapters aloud.
The families of Kohen Wiley, a 1-year-old killed by police in Senatobia earlier this year, and other Black Mississippians who have died under questionable circumstances joined Till on stage. She expressed her frustration with how Mississippi law enforcement handles cases like theirs.
“When we’re trying to solve cases and get justice for families, you can’t deal with people within the state of Mississippi,” Till said at the Oct. 2 event, referencing the death of Nick Naylor. “You cannot deal with them because you got to get the truth.”
Till is the first Democrat to announce a 2027 gubernatorial campaign. Mississippi’s Agricultural Commissioner Andy Gipson, Attorney General Lynn Fitch and former Mississippi Speaker of the House Phillip Gunn—all Republicans—announced their respective candidacies for the 2027 election earlier this year.
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