President Biden will establish a national monument on Tuesday honoring Emmett Till, the Black teenager who was brutally killed in 1955, and paying tribute to his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, according to White House officials.
Emmett’s murder and the subsequent activism of his mother helped propel the civil rights movement, and Mr. Biden will memorialize both individuals when he signs a proclamation naming the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument.
As defined by the National Park Service, a national monument is a protected area similar to a national park. There are more than 100 national monuments in the country. The new monument will consist of three protected sites in Illinois, where Emmett was from, and Mississippi, where he was killed.
One site is the church where Emmett’s funeral was held, Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, in a historically Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side known as Bronzeville. Another is Graball Landing in Tallahatchie County, Miss., where Emmett’s body is believed to have been pulled from the Tallahatchie River. A third site is the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Miss., where an all-white jury acquitted Emmett’s killers.
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| Emmett Till, who was kidnapped, tortured and killed by white men in the Mississippi Delta in August 1955, when he was 14.Associated Press |
“I’m so happy for the Till family and also our community that has worked tirelessly to get these sites recognized,” he said. “It’s just a lot of emotion.”The establishment of the new monument on Tuesday — what would have been Emmett’s 82nd birthday — comes amid polarized debates in the country about the teaching of Black history in public schools. Last week in Florida, the state’s Board of Education came under heavy criticism after approving a new set of standards for the instruction of African American history that included teaching middle schoolers that enslaved people developed skills in their servitude that benefited them.
Mr. Weems said monuments like the one for Emmett and Ms. Till-Mobley helped tell America’s story, playing a role in educating the country. “If we are to grow as a society,” he said, “we have to process past pain, past wounds that have taken place in this country, and Emmett Till represents some of those wounds.”
In August 1955, Emmett was 14 years old and visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta when he was kidnapped, tortured and killed after a white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, accused him of whistling at her at the store where she worked.