At a news conference Tuesday featuring surviving family members of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris announced the authorization of a national monument commemorating the civil rights figures.
A fact sheet from the Biden administration said the monument will be anchored at three places — in Chicago and at two Mississippi sites, in Sumner and near Glendora.
Till’s kidnapping and lynching in Mississippi in 1955 helped spur the Civil Rights Movement after his mother made the choice to put her 14-year-old son’s brutalized body on display in an open casket. It was her attempt to show the brutality of American racism.
Carolyn Bryant, a white woman whose dubious claims of sexual harassment led to the teenager’s murder, died in April and never faced charges. Till’s killers — Bryant’s husband and his half brother — were found not guilty of murder by an all-white jury but confessed shortly thereafter.
On Tuesday, which would have been Till’s 82nd birthday, Biden framed the monument as part of an effort to protect historical memory at a time when conservatives are trying to outlaw and restrict discussions about historic inequality.
“The country and the world saw — saw, not just heard — the story of Emmett Till and his mother as a story of a family’s promise and loss in the nation’s reckoning with hate, violence, racism, overwhelming abuse of power, and brutality,” he said.
Said Harris: “We must remember and teach our full history, even when it is painful.”
Echoing her criticism of Florida’s new rule that schools teach students that enslaved people sometimes benefited from slavery, the vice president denounced “those who attempt to teach that enslaved people benefited from slavery” and “those who insult us in an attempt to gaslight us.”
As I’ve written previously, Mississippi’s approach to the story of Till’s murder over the years has been a textbook case of historical whitewashing. Commemorative signs placed at Graball Landing, the spot where Till’s killers are believed to have thrown his maimed body into the Tallahatchie River, have been shot by vandals. And author Dave Tell has written a book, “Remembering Emmett Till,” on efforts by officials and others to downplay or even hide the story of what happened to Till.
I left thinking that efforts by the Till family, community activists and educators to ensure that this history is told accurately can serve as a blueprint for how to protect and promote historical memory.
In 2019, I visited Mississippi to report on some of these efforts, along with the unveiling of a bulletproof memorial by the river. Check out my dispatches here and here. I left thinking that efforts by the Till family, community activists and educators to ensure that this history is told accurately can serve as a blueprint for how to protect and promote historical memory.
One of the people I met down there is the Rev. Wheeler Parker, a cousin of Emmett’s and the last living witness of the kidnapping.
Parker, who introduced Biden at Tuesday’s news conference, has worked closely with organizations like the Emmett Till Memorial Commission to make sure his family’s story is told.
“It has been quite a journey for me from the darkness to the light,” he said, reflecting on the night of Till’s kidnapping.
It was a moment, he said, when he was “overwhelmed with terror and fear of certain death in the darkness of a thousand midnights. … Back then in the darkness, I could never imagine a moment like this: standing in the light of wisdom, grace and deliverance.”
Emmett Till's cousin, Rev Wheeler Parker Jr: "It's been quite a journey for me from darkness to the light, when I sat with my family on the night of terror when Emmett was taken from us, taken to be tortured, brutally murdered…back then I could never imagine a moment like this" pic.twitter.com/EI5LM406eS
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 25, 2023
Biden’s remarks show he sees the new monument as part of an effort to push back against historical whitewashing.
“At a time when there are those who seek to ban books, bury history, we’re making it clear — crystal, crystal clear — while darkness and denialism can hide much, they erase nothing,” the president said.
“We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know — we have to learn what we should know,” he added. “We should know about our country. We should know everything — the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation.”
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.