Emmett Till.
Associated Press
President Joe Biden will create a national monument in honor of Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley.
Till’s murder in Mississippi helped spark the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
The monument locations will consist of a site in Chicago and two sites in rural Mississippi.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday will create a national monument in honor of Emmett Till, the Black teenager from Chicago whose 1955 kidnapping and murder in Mississippi was a defining spark in the emerging civil-rights movement, a White House official said on Saturday.
Biden is set to make the announcement on July 25, which would have been Till’s 82nd birthday.
The president will sign a proclamation forming the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, which is also reflective of the decadeslong civil rights work of Till’s mother, who fought valiantly for equality for Black Americans after her son’s murder. The monument will consist of a site in Chicago, the city where Emmett Till was born, and two sites in Mississippi, where he traveled during that fateful 1955 summer to spend time with his cousins.
“The new monument will protect places that tell the story of Emmett Till’s too-short life and racially-motivated murder, the unjust acquittal of his murderers, and the activism of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who courageously brought the world’s attention to the brutal injustices and racism of the time, catalyzing the civil-rights movement,” a White House official said in a statement.
In August 1955, Emmett Till was accused by Carolyn Bryant Donham of making improper advances toward her while he was inside the Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Miss., which at the time was run by Donham and her then-husband, Roy Bryant.
The accusation prompted Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, to abduct Till at gunpoint from the home of his great-uncle, Moses Wright. Bryant and Milam then tortured and lynched the teenager before throwing his body into the Tallahatchie River.
Till’s battered body was weighed down by a cotton-gin fan and was found several days later.
His face was left unrecognizable. But, at his funeral service in Chicago, Mamie Till-Mobley insisted that her son would have an open casket funeral so the world could see the brutality and horror of what her son endured in the segregated South.
The Illinois monument site will be the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, on the city’s South Side, where Emmett Till’s funeral was held in 1955. The Mississippi sites include Graball Landing, where it is believed that Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, where Bryant and Milam were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury.
In a 1956 article in Look magazine, Bryant and Milam confessed to the murder. Both men have since died.
Donham died in April. She was 88 years old.
Last December, Congress voted to award the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously to Till and his mother.
In March 2022, Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which made lynching a federal hate crime for the first time in US history.
The president’s push to elevate civil rights leaders and acknowledge the full scope of Black history comes as Republicans in recent years have sought to limit how race can be taught in classrooms, with conservatives also targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and hailing the Supreme Court’s recent decision to end affirmative action in college admissions.
Biden’s original student debt relief plan, which was invalidated by the Supreme Court, was also intended to be one that had a significant racial equity element, as the administration sought to narrow the racial wealth gap by forgiving $10,000 in loans for individuals and $20,000 in loans for individuals who were Pell Grant recipients.