Biden names new monument Emmett Till as US grapples with racist history

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By Trevor Hunnicutt and Jonathan Allen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden will pay tribute on Tuesday to Emmett Till, the black teenager whose 1955 murder helped galvanize the civil rights movement, and his mother with a national monument in two states.

Till, 14 and visiting from Chicago, was beaten, shot and mutilated in Money, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955, four days after a 21-year-old white woman accused him of whistling at her. His body was thrown into a river.

The violent murder shone a light on the cause of civil rights in the United States after his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, held an open funeral and a photo of her son’s badly disfigured body appeared in black media.

The national monument designation of 5.7 acres (2.3 hectares) and three sites marks a vigorous new effort by the president to commemorate the country’s bloody racial history, even as Republicans in some states are pushing the boundaries of teaching that past.

“America is changing, America is moving forward,” said Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr., 84, a cousin of Till’s who was with the boy the night he was abducted at gunpoint from the parents’ home where they were staying in Mississippi.

“I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years and I try to tell young people that they’re happening, but they’re happening very slowly,” Parker said Monday in a phone interview as he traveled from Chicago to Washington to attend the signing ceremony at the White House as one of about 60 guests.

Tuesday marks the 82nd anniversary of Till’s birth in 1941. One of the monument sites is Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Till’s funeral was held.

The other sites selected are in Mississippi: Graball Landing, near where Till’s body was allegedly found; and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, where two white men who later confessed to Till’s murder were acquitted by an all-white jury.

Signs erected at Graball Landing since 2008 to commemorate Till’s murder have been repeatedly defaced by gunfire.

Going forward, this site and the others will be considered federal property and will receive approximately $180,000 a year in funding from the National Park Service. Any future vandalism would be investigated by federal law enforcement rather than local police, according to Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi.

Other such landmarks include the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty, and inventor Thomas Edison’s laboratory.

Biden, an 80-year-old Democrat, will likely need strong support from black voters to secure a second term in the 2024 presidential election.

He screened a film chronicling the lynching, “Till,” at the White House in February. Last March, he signed into law a bipartisan bill bearing Till’s name that, for the first time, made lynching a federal hate crime.

A Republican field led by former President Donald Trump has made conservative views on race and other controversial issues in history part of their platform, including book bans and advocacy efforts to teach school children accounts of the country’s past that they see as ideologically biased or unpatriotic.

“It’s an incredible and enlightening time to talk about the importance of this story as an American story that everyone can share now, especially at a time when people are trying to rewrite history,” said Christopher Benson, president of the nonprofit Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley Institute in Summit, Illinois.

“We now have a memorial that is not erasable. It cannot be banned and it cannot be censored, and we think that is a very important thing.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and Jonathan Allen; Editing by Heather Timmons and Lincoln Feast)

Copyright 2023 Thomson Reuters.

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