U.S. President Joe Biden signed a proclamation on Tuesday establishing a national monument honouring Emmett Till, the Black teenager from Chicago, whose abduction, torture and killing in Mississippi in 1955 helped propel the civil rights movement.
The proclamation — occurring on what would have been Till’s 82nd birthday — was also a posthumous honour for Mamie Till-Mobley, Till’s mother.
With the stroke of Biden’s pen, the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, located across three separate sites in Mississippi and Chicago, will be federally protected places.
“We are resolute that it now becomes an American story and not just a civil rights story,” Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., Till’s cousin, told The Associated Press ahead of a planned proclamation signing ceremony at the White House.
Altogether, the Till national monument will include 2.3 hectares of land and two historic buildings. The Mississippi sites are Graball Landing, the spot where Emmett’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River just outside of Glendora, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, where Emmett’s killers were tried.
At Graball Landing, a memorial sign installed in 2008 had been repeatedly stolen and was riddled with bullets. An inch-thick bulletproof sign was erected at the site in October 2019.
The Illinois site is Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Emmett’s funeral was held in September 1955. Till-Mobley insisted on an open casket funeral for her teenage son, and graphic images taken of his remains, sanctioned by his mother, were published by Jet magazine and propelled the civil rights movement.
‘Black history matters’
The move comes as conservative leaders, mostly at the state and local levels, push legislation that limits the teaching of slavery and Black history in public schools. Last week, the Florida Board of Education approved a revised Black history curriculum, which includes instruction that enslaved people benefited from skills that they learned.
In their remarks at Tuesday’s ceremony, both Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris took note of the recent trend, which gained traction during the pandemic. Harris said it was imperative to “to teach our full history, even when it is painful. Especially when it is painful.”
U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris, speaking at an event honouring Emmett Till — a Black teen whose 1955 lynching death galvanized the civil rights movement — says it’s critical to teach the full history of the U.S., ‘even when it is painful.
“Those who attempt to teach that enslaved people benefited from slavery, those who insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, who try to divide our nation with unnecessary debates,” she said. “Let us not be seduced into believing that somehow we will be better if we forget. We will be better if we remember.”
The White House in 2022 signed into law the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which makes it possible to prosecute a crime as a lynching when a conspiracy to commit a hate crime leads to death or serious bodily injury. A year earlier the administration declared Juneteenth, which recognizes the emancipation of Blacks from slavery as a federal holiday.
No convictions resulted
In the summer of 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley put her 14-year-old son on a train to her native Mississippi, where he was to spend time with his uncle and his cousins. In the overnight hours of Aug. 28, 1955, Emmett was taken from his uncle’s home at gunpoint by two vengeful white men.
Emmett’s alleged crime? Flirting with the wife of one of his kidnappers.
Three days later, a fisherman on the Tallahatchie River discovered the teenager’s bloated corpse — one of his eyes was detached, an ear was missing, his head was shot and bashed in.
At the trial of his killers in Mississippi, Till-Mobley bravely took the witness stand to counter the perverse image of her son that defence attorneys had painted for jurors and trial watchers.
Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted at trial. Months later, they confessed in a paid interview with a magazine.
The U.S. Justice Department reopened the investigation after a 2017 book quoted Carolyn Donham, Bryant’s wife, as saying she lied when she claimed Till grabbed her, whistled and made sexual advances. Relatives publicly denied that Donham recanted her allegations.
In 2021, the Justice Department closed the probe, saying there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Donham lied to the FBI. Donham died in April of this year at 88.
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