President Biden will build a national monument Tuesday honoring Emmett Till, the Black teenager who was brutally murdered in 1955, and paying tribute to his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, according to White House officials.
Emmett’s murder and his mother’s subsequent activism helped spur the civil rights movement, and Mr. Biden will commemorate 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 covers three protected areas in Illinois, where Emmett is 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. The other is Graball Landing in Tallahatchie County, Miss., where Emmett’s body is believed to have been pulled from the Tallahatchie River. The third site was the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Miss., where an all-white jury acquitted Emmett’s killers.
Patrick Weems, the executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, said Sunday that news of the monument brought tears to his eyes.
“I am so happy for the Till family and our community who have worked tirelessly to identify these sites,” he said. “Just a lot of emotion.”
The construction of the new monument Tuesday — on what would have been Emmett’s 82nd birthday — comes amid polarized national debates over the teaching of Black history in public schools. Last week in Florida, the state Board of Education came under heavy criticism after approving a new set of standards for teaching African American history that includes teaching middle schools that enslaved people developed skills during their slavery 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 nation. “If we’re going to grow as a society,” he said, “we have to process the past pain, the past wounds that happened in this country, and Emmett Till represents some of those wounds.”
“I think it allows us to never say again, that this is not who we are anymore,” he added. “This is not who we want.”
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 in the store where he worked.
Her husband at the time, Roy Bryant, and JW Milam, her half brother, kidnapped Emmett at gunpoint and drove him to a barn about 45 minutes away. After he was tortured, he was shot in the head and a 75-pound cotton gin fan was tied around his neck with barbed wire and his body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River.
Emmett’s body is eventually pulled from the river, though his body can only be identified by a silver ring on one of his fingers. One eye was punctured, both wrists were broken and parts of the skull were crushed.
Ms. Till-Mobley insisted on an open casket at his funeral, saying “the whole country must bear witness to it.”
“They had to see what I saw,” he wrote in his memoir. He went on to become an educator and civil rights activist, and died in 2003.
An estimated 250,000 mourners came to the four-day public viewing to witness the horror for themselves, according to The Chicago Defender, and many more saw photos of Emmett’s body in Jet magazine.
The case went to trial, but an all-white, all-male jury acquitted both men, Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam, who was accused of murder. Later, a grand jury chose not to indict them on kidnapping charges. After the men were acquitted and could no longer be charged, they confessed to the murder. They are both dead.
Last year, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Ms. Donham, whose accusations prompted the murder, on charges of kidnapping or manslaughter. He died in April.
In 2008, eight signs detailing Emmett’s story were installed in northwest Mississippi, including one at the Graball Landing site. A year later, the sign at the river site where Emmett’s body was discovered was stolen and thrown into the river. A replacement sign was soon damaged by bullet holes. In 2018, another replacement was installed, but 35 days after the ascent, it was also shot down. In 2019, a new, bulletproof sign was installed, along with a surveillance system.
Rev. Willie Williams, the chair of the board of directors of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, said in a statement on Sunday that the national monument will be a symbol of recovery. It will remind people, he added, that “from the ashes of tragedy, beauty can emerge and that through collective action, we can transform pain into progress.”