Biden names new Emmett Till monument as US grapples with racist history
By Trevor Hunnicutt and Jonathan Allen
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday will honor Emmett Till, the Black teenager whose 1955 killing helped galvanize the Civil Rights movement, and his mother with a national monument across two states.
Till, 14 and visiting from Chicago, was beaten, shot and mutilated in Money, Mississippi, on Aug. 28, 1955, four 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 spotlight on the U.S. civil rights cause after his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, held an open-casket funeral and a photo of her son's badly disfigured body appeared in Black media.
The national monument designation across 5.7 acres (2.3 hectares) and three sites marks a forceful new effort by the president to memorialize the country's bloody racial history even as Republicans in some states push limits on how that past is taught.
«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 a lot of changes over the years and I try to tell young people that they happen, but they happen very slow,» Parker said on Monday in a telephone interview as he traveled from Chicago to Washington to attend the signing ceremony at the White House as one of approximately 60 guests.
Tuesday marks the 82nd anniversary of Till's birth in 1941. One of the monument sites is the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Till's funeral took place.
The other selected sites are in Mississippi: Graball Landing, close to where Till's body is believed to be
Read more on investing.com
