2023-07-23 11:55:31
Mr. 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 latter 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 Mr Till’s life and death at age 14, the acquittal of his white killers and his mother’s activism. Mr Till’s mother’s insistence on an open coffin to show the world how her son had been brutalized and Jet magazine’s decision to publish photos of his mutilated body helped reinvigorate the civil rights movement.
Mr Biden’s decision also comes at a difficult time in the United States when it comes to racial issues. Conservative leaders oppose the teaching of slavery and black history in public schools, as well as the integration of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, in 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 might suggest that in the midst of these atrocities there was any benefit in being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Ms. Harris lamented in a speech from Jacksonville, Florida.
Mr DeSantis said he had no role in shaping his state’s new education standards, but defended the material on how slaves benefited.
“It’s all rooted in anything factual,” he said in response.
The monument to Emmett Till and his mother will include three sites in the two states.
The Illinois site is the 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 Emmett Till in September 1955.
The Mississippi sites are Graball Landing, believed to be where Mr. Till’s mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Mr. Till’s killers were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury.
Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when Carolyn Bryant Donham said 14-year-old Mr. Till had booed her and made sexual advances to her while she was working at a store in the small Money community.
Mr. Till was later abducted and his body eventually pulled from the Tallahatchie River, where he had been dumped following being shot and tied to a cotton gin fan.
Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother JW Milam, went on trial for murder regarding a month following Mr Till’s death, but an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted them. Months later, they confessed to killing Mr. Till in a paid interview with Look magazine. Mr Bryant was married to Ms Donham in 1955. She died earlier this year.
The monument will be the fourth Mr Biden has created since taking office in 2021, and the most recent tribute he has paid to young Till.
For Black History Month this year, Mr Biden hosted a screening of the film “Till,” a drama that focuses on his murder.
In March 2022, Mr. Biden signed into law the Emmett Till “anti-lynching” law. Congress first considered such legislation more than 120 years ago.
The Department of Justice announced in December 2021 that it was ending its investigation into Mr Till’s murder.
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