Biden to designate national monuments honouring Emmett Till, his mother | CBC News

U.S. President Joe Biden will sign a proclamation on Tuesday establishing a national monument honouring Emmett Till, the Black teenager from Chicago, whose abduction, torture and killing in Mississippi in 1955 helped propel the civil rights movement.

The proclamation also honours Mamie Till-Mobley, Till’s mother.

With the stroke of Biden’s pen, the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, located across three separate sites in Mississippi and Chicago, will be federally protected places.

Till’s living family members, along with a national organization seeking to preserve Black cultural heritage sites, say their work protecting the Till legacy continues even after Tuesday’s declaration. They hope to raise money to restore the sites and develop educational programming to support their inclusion in the National Park System.

“We are resolute that it now becomes an American story and not just a civil rights story,” Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., Till’s cousin, told The Associated Press ahead of a planned proclamation signing ceremony at the White House.

For Parker, who was 16 when he witnessed Emmett’s abduction, the Till monument proclamation begins to lift the weight of trauma that he has carried for most of his life. Tuesday is the anniversary of Emmett Till’s birth in 1941. He would have been 82 today.

“I’ve been suffering for all these years of how they’ve portrayed him — I still deal with that,” said Parker, 84. “The truth should carry itself, but it doesn’t have wings. You have to put some wings on it.”

Altogether, the Till national monument will include 2.3 hectares of land and two historic buildings. The Mississippi sites are Graball Landing, the spot where Emmett’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River just outside of Glendora, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, where Emmett’s killers were tried.

At Graball Landing, a memorial sign installed in 2008 had been repeatedly stolen and was riddled with bullets. An inch-thick bulletproof sign was erected at the site in October 2019.

The Illinois site is Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Emmett’s funeral was held in September 1955. Mamie Till-Mobley insisted on an open casket funeral for her teenage son, and graphic images taken of his remains, sanctioned by his mother, were published by Jet magazine and propelled the civil rights movement.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday that the Till national monument will be the Biden-Harris administration’s fourth designation that reflects their “work to advance civil rights.”

‘Black history matters’

The move comes as conservative leaders, mostly at the state and local levels, push legislation that limits the teaching of slavery and Black history in public schools. Last week, the Florida Board of Education approved a revised Black history curriculum, which includes instruction that enslaved people benefited from skills that they learned.

Biden’s administration “will continue to speak out against hateful attempts to rewrite our history and strongly oppose any actions that threaten to divide us and take our country backwards,” Jean-Pierre said.

The White House in 2022 signed into law the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which makes it possible to prosecute a crime as a lynching when a conspiracy to commit a hate crime leads to death or serious bodily injury. A year earlier the administration declared Juneteenth, which recognizes the emancipation of Blacks from slavery as a federal holiday.

Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said the federal designation is a milestone in a yearslong effort to preserve and protect places tied to events that have shaped the nation and that symbolize national wounds.

“We believe that not until Black history matters will Black lives and Black bodies matter,” he said. “Through reckoning with America’s racist past, we have the opportunity to heal.”

Biden’s proclamation on Tuesday protects places that are central to the story of Till’s life and death at age 14, the acquittal of his white killers by an all-white jury and his late mother’s activism.

No convictions resulted

In the summer of 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley put her son Emmett on a train to her native Mississippi, where he was to spend time with his uncle and his cousins. In the overnight hours of Aug. 28, 1955, Emmett was taken from his uncle’s home at gunpoint by two vengeful white men.

Emmett’s alleged crime? Flirting with the wife of one of his kidnappers.

Three days later, a fisherman on the Tallahatchie River discovered the teenager’s bloated corpse — one of his eyes was detached, an ear was missing, his head was shot and bashed in.

At the trial of his killers in Mississippi, Till-Mobley bravely took the witness stand to counter the perverse image of her son that defence attorneys had painted for jurors and trial watchers.

Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, were acquitted at trial. Months later, they confessed in a paid interview with a magazine. 

The U.S. Justice Department reopened the investigation after a 2017 book quoted Carolyn Donham, Bryant’s wife, as saying she lied when she claimed Till grabbed her, whistled and made sexual advances. Relatives publicly denied that Donham recanted her allegations.

In 2021, the Justice Department closed the probe, saying there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Donham lied to the FBI. Donham died in April of this year at age 88.