Biden to establish national monument honoring Emmett Till

President Biden will reportedly sign a proclamation on Tuesday to establish a national monument honoring Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black teenager whose lynching in 1955 galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.

The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument will span three sites in Illinois and Mississippi, marking locations that are central to Till’s story, according to The Associated Press. 

“The new monument will protect places that tell the story of Emmett Till’s too-short life and racially-motivated murder, the unjust acquittal of his murderers, and the activism of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who courageously brought the world’s attention to the brutal injustices and racism of the time, catalyzing the civil rights movement,” a White House official told CNN.

It will include the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Till’s mother held an open-casket funeral to display her son’s brutalized body.

Graball Landing in Tallahatchie County, Miss., where Till’s body is believed to have been pulled from the Tallahatchie River, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Miss., where Till’s murderers were acquitted, will also be part of the monument.

Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi in August 1955, when he was kidnapped, beaten and shot for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

Two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were found not guilty of Till’s murder by an all-white jury in September 1955. However, they later admitted to the killing in an interview with Look Magazine, notes the AP.