Honoring Emmett Till's Birthday: Biden to Establish National Monument

What's the story?

• President Joe Biden will establish a national monument for Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley on the 82nd anniversary of Till's birth (July 25, 1941).
• Human rights activists and observers have celebrated the move to increase the historical representation of Black Americans, but it comes amid polarized debates in the country about the teaching of Black history in public schools.
• Biden said:

"At a time when there are those who seek to ban books, bury history, we're making it clear — crystal clear. Though darkness and denialism can hide much, they erase race nothing."

Who was Emmett Till?

• Emmett Till was a 14-year-old Chicago native who was abducted, tortured, and lynched by two white men while visiting his family in Money, Mississippi, in 1955.
• During his visit home, a white woman working as a grocery clerk, Carolyn Bryant Donham, accused Till of making advances towards her. Three days later, Carolyn's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother J.W. Milam abducted Till from his relatives' home.
• After torturing Till, they shot him in the head, tied a 75-pound cotton gin fan to his neck with barbed wire, and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River, where it was found three days later. He was so disfigured that he could only be identified by a ring on his finger.
• In 2022, a grand jury in Mississippi decided not to prosecute Carolyn Donham for her role in the events. Before her death this year, at 88, Donham told a historian that she had made up the allegations and that Till had never propositioned her. 
• His murder and the following trial - in which an all-white jury acquitted the killers - gained international attention. It was a watershed moment in the early civil rights movement, which Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, was instrumental in leading.
• Till-Mobley insisted on an open-casket funeral, galvanizing civil rights activism across the country.

Where will the monuments be?

• The national monument will consist of three different sites in Mississippi and Illinois. One will be located in the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville, in Chicago's South Side, where mourners paid their respects in 1955. An estimated 250,000 mourners visited the open casket over four days.
• The second site will be at Graball Landing, Mississippi, where Till's body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River.
• The third will be at Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Till's killers were acquitted.
• Patrick Weems from the Emmett Till Interpretive Center said:

"If we are to grow as a society, we have to process past pain, past wounds that have taken place in this country, and Emmett Till represents some of those wounds."

—Emma Kansiz 

(Photo Credit: Wikipedia)