Biden designates new Emmett Till monument as debates over U.S. history intensify

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, 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 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.

“Darkness and denialism can hide much but they erase nothing,” Biden told guests in the ornate, marble edged Indian Treaty Room next to the White House, before signing the proclamation. “We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know.”

Tuesday marks the 82nd anniversary of Till’s birth in 1941. One of the monument sites is his funeral location, Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, in Chicago.

The other selected sites are in Mississippi: Graball Landing, close to 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.
 
 
 
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Article URL : https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/25/biden-designates-new-emmett-till-monument-as-debates-over-us-history-intensify.html