WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden will establish a national monument to honor Emmett Till, the black Chicago teenager who was abducted, tortured and killed in 1955 after he was accused of whistling a white woman in Mississippi, and his mother, a White House official said Saturday.
Biden will sign a proclamation on Tuesday to create the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument at three sites in Illinois and Mississippi, according to the official. The individual spoke on condition of anonymity because the White House had not officially announced the president’s plans.
Tuesday is the anniversary of Emmett Till’s birth in 1941.
The monument will protect places that are central to the story of Till’s life and death at age 14, the acquittal of his white killers and his mother’s activism, which helped spark the civil rights movement. Till’s mother insisted that a coffin be opened so the world could see how her son had been brutalized and Jet magazine published photos of his body.
Biden’s decision also comes at a difficult time in the United States on issues surrounding race. Conservative leaders oppose the teaching of slavery and black history in public schools, as well as the integration of diversity, equity and inclusion programs from college classrooms to corporate boardrooms.
Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday criticized a revised black history curriculum in Florida that includes teaching that slaves benefited from the skills they learned at the hands of those who denied them freedom. The Florida Board of Education approved the program to satisfy legislation signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate who has accused public schools of liberal indoctrination.
“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Harris asked in a speech from Jacksonville, Florida.
The monument to Till and his mother will include three separate sites in the two states, including Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville, a historically black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Thousands of people gathered at the church to mourn the death of Emmett Till in September 1955.
In Mississippi, the monument will include Graball Landing, believed to be where Till’s mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. The third site is the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Till’s killers were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury.
Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when Carolyn Bryant Donham said 14-year-old Till whistled and made sexual advances at her while working at a store in the small Money community.
Till was abducted and a few days later his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, where he had been dumped after being shot and weighted down with a fan of cotton gin.
Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother JW Milam, went on trial for murder about a month after Till’s death, but an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted them. Months later, they confessed in a paid interview with Look magazine. Bryant was married to Donham in 1955. She died earlier this year.
The monument will be the fourth Biden has created since taking office in 2021.