President Biden establishes monument honoring Emmett Till

The president signed a proclamation on Tuesday for the creation of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Illinois and Mississippi.

President Biden today signed a proclamation establishing a national monument for Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy who was a victim of a gruesome racist murder in 1955, and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, whose push for justice helped spark the civil rights movement.

The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument will be placed at three sites in Illinois and Mississippi.

“This is an important moment showing and lifting up the story of Emmett Till,” according to White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. President Biden signed the proclamation on what would have been Till’s 82nd birthday.

The White House also said, “The new national monument will tell the story of the events surrounding Emmett Till’s murder, their significance in the civil rights movement and American history, and the broader story of Black oppression, survival, and bravery in America.”

Till died in August 1955 while visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi. A white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, accused Till of whistling at her while she worked at a local store. Roy Bryant, Donham’s husband at the time, and his half-brother J.W. Milam abducted Till, tortured and killed him, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, authorities found Till’s badly disfigured corpse on Aug. 31.

Still, Till’s mother demanded an open-casket funeral that revealed the inhumanity of her son’s death. She famously said, “Let the world see what they did to my boy.”

Some 250,000 mourners attended Till’s funeral. Photos of his beaten body appeared in major media publications and sparked outrage that helped spark the civil rights movement.

On Tuesday, with the members of the Till family in attendance, President Biden signed the proclamation.

“Today, on what would have been Emmett’s 82nd birthday, we add another chapter to the story of remembrance and healing,” Biden said at the signing ceremony.

The Till family home was in Chicago, and one of the monument’s three protected sites will be at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, the location of the teen’s funeral.

The other two sites will be in Mississippi, one at Graball Landing, where authorities recovered Till’s body, and the other at the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, where Till’s killers were tried. An all-white jury acquitted the men, although the culprits later confessed to the murder.

Milam died in 1981, and Bryant in 1994.

Leon Russell, chair of the national board of the NAACP, praised the creation of the monument. “The president’s decision to create this multi-location monument in 2023 is an affirmation of the reality of the Black experience in the United States,” Russell told TheGrio. “This is a major move, given current attempts to whitewash and hide that experience.”

The proclamation comes as efforts across the country seek to diminish or even erase the experiences of Black people in America. In Florida, education officials are under fire for creating an education curriculum that claims Black people benefited from enslavement. In South Carolina, school officials told a teacher not to use Ta-Nehisi Coates’ acclaimed book “Between the World and Me” in a lesson because it offended white students.

“Darkness and denialism can hide much. They erase nothing,” Biden said at the proclamation ceremony. “We just can’t choose to learn what we want to know. We have to learn what we should know,” he said. The new monument “reflects the Administration’s commitment to protecting places that help tell a more complete story of our nation’s history.”

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