Washington [US], July 26: US President Biden on Tuesday signed a proclamation creating a national monument in honour of Mamie Till Mobley and her son Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose brutal killing in Mississippi helped galvanize the civil rights movement.
The monument, spread over three sites in Illinois and Mississippi, will tell the story of Till's murder in 1955, and of his mother's efforts to ensure it would never been forgotten.
"I can't fathom what it must have been like," Biden said Tuesday - on what would have bill Emmett Till's 82nd birthday."It's hard to believe I was 12 years old. I know no matter how much time has passed, how many birthdays, how many events, how many anniversaries, it's hard to relive this."
Till was lynched for allegedly making comments toward a white woman in Mississippi while on a trip from Chicago. His mother held an open-casket funeral to show the horrors of what happened to her son.
Till's disfigured face - barely recognizable - was memorialized and syndicated in photos. For many, it was the first proof of the brutality of the Jim Crow South.
Biden spoke to Till-Mobley's courage in holding an open-casket service. "She said let the people see what I've seen," he said. "The country and the world saw, and that's the story of Emmett Till and his mother as a story of a family's promise and loss and the nation's reckoning with hate, violence, racism, overwhelming abuse of power, brutality."
The new monuments, Biden said, is another chapter in the nation's healing.
As Biden signed the proclamation, he was flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris, members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr, Till's cousin who was present the night Till was kidnapped. The national monument consists of three separate sites. The first, in Graball Landing, Miss., is the site where Till's body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River.
The second site will be in Chicago, in the historically Black neighbourhood of Bronzeville on the city's South Side. Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ is where Till-Mobley held her son's open casket funeral. The final site of the new monument is the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Miss. It was in this courthouse where the trial of Till's murderers began. After only an hour of deliberation, it was in this courthouse that an all-white jury acquitted Till's killers.
Source: Qatar Tribune