Biden designates new national monument to honor Emmett Till, Mamie Till-Mobley

President Biden on Tuesday signed a proclamation creating a national monument in honor of Mamie Till Mobley and her son Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose brutal killing in Mississippi helped galvanize the civil rights movement.

The monument, spread over three sites in Illinois and Mississippi, will tell the story of Till’s murder in 1955, and of his mother’s efforts to ensure it would never been forgotten.

“I can’t fathom what it must have been like,” Biden said Tuesday — on what would have bill Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday. “It’s hard to believe I was 12 years old. I know no matter how much time has passed, how many birthdays, how many events, how many anniversaries, it’s hard to relive this.”

Till was lynched for allegedly making comments toward a white woman in Mississippi while on a trip from Chicago. His mother held an open-casket funeral to show the horrors of what happened to her son.

Till’s disfigured face – barely recognizable – was memorialized and syndicated in photos. For many, it was the first proof of the brutality of the Jim Crow South. 

Biden spoke to Till-Mobley’s courage in holding an open-casket service. 

“She said let the people see what I’ve seen,” he said. “The country and the world saw, and that’s the story of Emmett Till and his mother as a story of a family’s promise and loss and the nation’s reckoning with hate, violence, racism, overwhelming abuse of power, brutality.”

The new monuments, Biden said, is another chapter in the nation’s healing.

As Biden signed the proclamation, he was flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris, members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., Till’s cousin who was present the night Till was kidnapped. 

The national monument consists of three separate sites. The first, in Graball Landing, Miss., is the site where Till’s body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River. Though the community had erected a memorial sign in 2008, it had been vandalized numerous times, as well as removed and even shot at. A new, bulletproof sign was dedicated in 2019.

The second site will be in Chicago, in the historically Black neighborhood of Bronzeville on the city’s South Side. Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ is where Till-Mobley held her son’s open casket funeral. An estimated 125,000 people attended Till’s services over the course of several days. 

The final site of the new monument is the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Miss. It was in this courthouse where the trial of Till’s murderers began. After only an hour of deliberation, it was in this courthouse that an all-white jury acquitted Till’s killers. In a paid interview later, both killers admitted to lynching Till.

Both Biden and Harris highlighted that this history must be told – a jab toward state legislatures that have tried to limit teachings on Black history and have banned books that tell stories of the civil rights movement. 

“Our history as a nation is born of tragedy and triumph, of struggle and success,” said Harris. “That is who we are, and as people who love our country, as patriots, we know that we must remember and teach our full history even when it is painful – especially when it is painful.

“Today, there are those in our nation who would prefer to erase or even rewrite the ugly parts of our past,” she continued. “Those who attempt to teach that enslaved people benefited from slavery; those who insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, who try to divide our nation with unnecessary debates. Let us not be seduced into believing that somehow we will be better if we forget.” 

The national monument follows a year of action to honor both the 14-year-old and his mother. 

In December, the House passed a resolution to posthumously award both Till and his mother the Congressional Gold Medal. The resolution followed the March 2022 signing of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which made lynching a federal hate crime.

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For decades, members of Till’s family as well as other civil rights and community leaders have fought for these sites to be protected.   

“This country owes so much to the Till family for insisting that what was always known to be wrong someday would be made right,” said Paula Johnson, a professor of law at Syracuse University. “But individuals, officials, and institutions repeatedly failed them.”

Not only did the all-white jury fail to convict the men who murdered Till, said Johnson, but after Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman who accused Till of making lewd comments toward her, admitted to lying about the incident, a majority-Black Mississippi grand jury declined to indict her.

Then, another grand jury in Mississippi last year also declined to indict Donham on kidnapping and manslaughter charges, despite new information about an unserved arrest warrant and an unpublished memoir by Donham. 

“These national monuments are a testament that efforts to quash truth will not succeed and that memory, legacy and the never-ending demand for justice will prevail,” said Johnson, founding director of the Cold Case Justice Initiative. “As the nation pays honor and gratitude to the Till family through these monuments, we are reminded that we must face all that we are if we ever hope to be all that we can be.”