Segregated in life and death: The American military cemetery at Oise-Aisne, France

The Oise-Aisne American Cemetery, established in 1918, contains the final resting places of over 6,000 American service members killed in action against Germany and the Central Powers during World War I.

Oise-Aisne American Cemetery is about an hour’s drive from Paris, France

Arguably the most famous American interred among the four well manicured A-D sections at Oise-Aisne is poet Joyce Kilmer, 31, the author of Trees who was killed by a sniper's bullet during the Second Battle of the Marne on July 31, 1918.

Easily the most infamous American interred is Louis Till, a Black American who wasn't born until 1922—four years after World War I ended—but would die 23 years later in 1945 after the end of World War II. If the last name strikes a chord it should; Till was the former husband of Chicago native Mamie Carthan Till (Mobley), and the father of Emmett “Louis” Till, the young Black boy whose brutal lynching at the hands of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam in Money, Mississippi during the summer of 1955 is considered one of the pivotal events of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Mrs. Mamie and Emmett Louis Till

U.S. Army Private Louis Till

Louis Till joined the Army in 1944 after a domestic incident in which he allegedly choked his wife, Mamie, who then reportedly scalded him with boiling hot water in self defense. To dispose of his criminal case, Till was offered the option of going to jail or joining the military and upon choosing the latter, enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army.

Till was not vouchsafed an honorable death in action against Axis forces during the war, but was hanged to death following a court martial which found him guilty of raping two women and murdering one, Anna Zanchi, in Civitavecchia, Italy.

The charges held that on or about July 19, 1944, Private Louis Till was charged with murder and rape along with Privates Fred McMurray and James Thomas, the latter of whom struck a deal with prosecutors to testify against Till (and McMurray) to avoid the death penalty. McMurray, too, blamed Till for planning the heinous crimes during interrogation, but was not spared conviction—or the hangman's noose—when their executions were carried out on July 2, 1945.

Till's body was later interred in Section "E" at Oise-Aisne, a segment set off from the main parts of the cemetery, where the remains of 96 American soldiers who were executed for various crimes including rape and murder continue to rest in relative anonymity.

Section “E” contains the graves of 96 soldiers executed following courts martial during and immediately following World War II. One soldier executed for desertion, Eddie Slovik, was exhumed upon approval of President Ronald Reagan and returned to Detroit, Michigan to be buried next to his wife, Antoinette Slovik….

Ominously, of the 96 executed soldiers who were executed for murder or rape during the war, 80 were Black, a fact that leads many legal historians, including yours truly, to question whether justice or "Just-Us" was served in many of these cases where the soldiers were quickly investigated, tried, and condemned to death by overwhelmingly white military jurors—death sentences that were affirmed by an all white command and general staff, up to and including Supreme Allied Commander (and later president) Dwight D. Eisenhower?

We may never fully know…

Per the military's code, each condemned soldier, including Till, was dishonorably discharged and had all rank and insignia removed from their uniforms before meeting their fates. To add further insult and disgrace, the condemned soldiers in Section E at Oise-Aisne are not buried beneath crosses like the deceased in Sections A-D, but are marked only by a small slab which contains their marker number that was catalogued according to their serial numbers; this section, colloquially known as the "House of Shame," is the only area at Oise-Aisne that does not fly an American flag!

Private Louis Till lies beneath grave marker 73. His final resting place was unknown until 2009, when a Freedom of Information Act request placed the names with the serial numbers and grave markings at Oise-Aisne Cemetery

Ten years later, when Roy Bryant and JW Milam were indicted and acquitted of lynching Emmett Till to death, some southern journalists and legal analysts tried to justify the unjustifiable killing of the 14-year old boy by suggesting that he was "pre-disposed" to "raping" a white woman because his father, Louis Till, had been hanged for raping and murdering white women during the war.

Mrs. Mamie Till-Mobley is held by her husband, Gene Mobley, as they review their son Emmett's lynched remains in September of 1955

Roy Bryant and his wife Carolyn, the harpy who lied on Emmett Till, grin alongside JW Milam and his wife following their acquittal in the sham murder trial in Mississippi…

While such suggestions were a vile and disgusting form of pseudo-science (rape being genetic), the 12 white men who sat on the jury acquitted the clearly guilty bastards in less than an hour—fully adhering to the warnings of defense counsel that their "(white) Anglo Saxon ancestors" would be appalled if they convicted the pair of murderers for killing “a colored person.” A reminder that, whether in military courts martial or civilian trials, "color" has ALWAYS played a major role in American jurisprudence.

Lest we forget...

The final resting places for Mamie (Till) and Gene Mobley, and Emmett Till in Alsip, Illinois—just outside of Chicago…