On July 25, the day that would have been Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday, President Joe Biden hosted a White House signing ceremony for a proclamation establishing the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Mississippi and Illinois. Three sites are now part of this monument honoring Emmett Till, who had just turned 14 when he was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in August 1955. His devoted mother Mamie, her decision to defy authorities who wanted Emmett’s body buried quickly in Mississippi and instead to hold his funeral in Chicago with an open casket to let the world see what his hateful racist murderers had done to her child, became an inflection point in the Civil Rights Movement. This new monument underscores our nation’s need to keep exposing and acknowledging the truth today.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were joined at the ceremony by members of Emmett Till’s family, including his cousin, Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr. The cousins lived next door to each other in Chicago and were best friends, and during that summer break, Wheeler and Emmett traveled together to spend a two-week visit with relatives near Money, Mississippi. Wheeler was with Emmett at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market the day Carolyn Bryant falsely said Emmett grabbed and propositioned her after buying two cents’ worth of bubble gum, and he was in the room four nights later when Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam came to their family’s house, dragged Emmett out of bed at gunpoint, and drove off with him. As he spoke at the ceremony honoring his cousin, Rev. Wheeler Parker, Jr. said: “When I sat with my family on the night of terror, when Emmett Till, our beloved ‘Bobo,’ was taken from us, taken to be tortured and brutally murdered—back then, when I was overwhelmed with terror and fear of certain death in the darkness of a thousand midnights, in a pitch-black house on what some have called Dark Fear Road, back then in the darkness, I could never imagine a moment like this: standing in the light of wisdom, grace, and deliverance.”
Rev. Parker is imagining a powerful moment for all of us. The first site in the National Monument, the Graball Landing River site, is in the area along the Tallahatchie River near Glendora, Mississippi, where Emmett’s mutilated body was recovered. A memorial sign installed nearby in 2008 was destroyed, and two replacements were repeatedly riddled with bullets and vandalized over the next decade, and these contemporary acts of white supremacy and hatred are also exposed here. The second site is the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago–where as many as 125,000 people attended Emmett Till’s visitation and funeral services, documented in the searing pho- tographs and news coverage. The third is the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were tried in a segregate ,…
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