President Joe Biden on Tuesday honored Emmett Till, the Black teenager whose 1955 killing helped galvanize the Civil Rights movement, and his mother with a national monument spanning two states and a call for Americans to learn the country’s full history.
Till, 14 and visiting from Chicago, was beaten, shot and mutilated in Money, Mississippi, on Aug. 28, 1955, 4 days after a 21-year-old white woman accused him of whistling at her. His body was dumped in a river.
The violent killing put a highlight on the U.S. civil rights cause after his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, held an open-casket funeral and a photograph of her son’s badly disfigured body appeared in Black media.
The national monument designation across 5.7 acres and three sites marks a forceful latest effort by the president to memorialize the country’s bloody racial history at the same time as Republicans in some states push limits on how that past is taught.
“Darkness and denialism can hide much but they erase nothing,” Biden told guests within the ornate, marble edged Indian Treaty Room next to the White House, before signing the proclamation. “We won’t just decide to learn what we would like to know.”
Tuesday marks the 82nd anniversary of Till’s birth in 1941. One in all the monument sites is his funeral location, Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, in Chicago.
The opposite chosen sites are in Mississippi: Graball Landing, near where Till’s body is believed to be have been recovered; and Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, where two white men who later confessed to Till’s killing were acquitted by an all-white jury.
Signs erected at Graball Landing since 2008 to commemorate Till’s killing have been repeatedly defaced by gunfire.
Now that site and the others can be considered federal property, receiving about $180,000 a yr in funding from the National Park Service. Any future vandalism can be investigated by federal law enforcement reasonably than local police, in line with Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi.
Other such monuments include the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty and inventor Thomas Edison’s laboratory.
“America is changing, America is making progress,” said the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., 84, a cousin of Till’s who was with the boy on the night he was abducted at gunpoint from the relatives’ house they were staying at in Mississippi.
“I’ve seen numerous changes over time and I attempt to tell young folks that they occur, but they occur very slow,” Parker said in a telephone interview as he traveled from Chicago to Washington to attend the ceremony as one among the White House’s roughly 60 guests.
Biden will likely need strong support from Black voters to secure a second term within the 2024 presidential election.
He screened a movie recounting the lynching, “Till,” on the White House in February. Last March, he signed into law a bipartisan bill named for Till that for the primary time made lynching a federal hate crime.
A Republican field led by former President Donald Trump has made conservative views on race and other contentious problems with history an element of their platform, including banning books and fighting efforts to show school children accounts of the country’s past that they regard as ideologically inflected or unpatriotic.
“Today there are those in our nation preferring to erase and even rewrite the ugly parts of our past, those that try and teach that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” Vice President Kamala Harris said on the event, a subtle reference to reported comments by Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis last week that some enslaved people had the advantage of learning a craft.
“That is an incredible, teachable moment to speak in regards to the importance of this story as an American story that everyone can share in now, particularly at a time when persons are attempting to rewrite history,” said Christopher Benson, president of the non-profit organization the Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley Institute in Summit, Illinois.
“We’ve got a memorial now that will not be erasable. It could’t be banned and it will probably’t be censored, and we expect that is an important thing.”