According to a White House official, President Joe Biden of the United States will build a national monument honoring Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley.
Till, a Black adolescent from Chicago, was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in 1955 after being suspected of whistling at a White woman in Mississippi.
On Tuesday, Biden will sign a proclamation establishing the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in three locations in Illinois and Mississippi.
Emmett Till’s 1941 birth anniversary is on Tuesday.
Caroline Bryant Donham accused the 14-year-old of whistling and making sexual overtures toward her as she was working in a store in the small town of Money. Till was visiting family in Mississippi at the time.
Till was later kidnapped, and his body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River, where he had been thrown after being shot and weighted down.
Two White men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, were tried on murder charges around a month after Till was slain, but they were acquitted by an all-White Mississippi jury. They admitted to killing Till months later in a paid interview with Look magazine. In 1955, Bryant married Donham. She passed away earlier this year, How Africa reported.
Till’s mother’s insistence on an open casket in order to show the world how her son had been brutalized, as well as Jet’s magazine’s decision to publish images of his disfigured body, fueled the Civil Rights Movement.
How Africa in May 2023, reported that Argo Community High School erected a sculpture honoring Mamie Till-Mobley as well as a walkway named after her son on Saturday. The distinction was bestowed on Till-Mobley by her alma school to commemorate her life and legacy in the Summit community.
The monument will be Biden’s fourth since taking office in 2021, and his most recent tribute to the younger Till.
This year, for Black History Month, Biden hosted a screening of the film “Till,” a drama about his lynching.
Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act into law in March 2022. Such legislation was first debated by Congress more than 120 years ago.
The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument will safeguard sites central to the story of Till’s life and death at the age of 14, the acquittal of his white killers, and his mother’s activism, such as the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville, a historically Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. In September 1955, thousands of people gathered at the chapel to mourn Emmett Till.
Graball Landing, where Till’s mangled body was taken from the Tallahatchie River, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Till’s killers were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury, are the Mississippi locations.
In December 2021, the Justice Department announced the conclusion of its investigation into Till’s death.