Site Of Emmett Till's Viewing, Funeral, To Become National Monument

CHICAGO — President Joe Biden is expected to sign a proclamation Tuesday to establish the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument at one site in Illinois and two in Mississippi, on what would have been Till’s 82nd birthday.

In August 1955, the Black teen from Chicago’s South Side and his 16-year-old cousin boarded a train from Chicago’s Union State to visit Till’s great-uncle Mose Wright in Money, Miss. The 14-year-old Till was abducted from his bed and then beaten, tortured and shot for allegedly wolf-whistling at a white woman in Mississippi.

The monument is intended to protect places important to Till’s life and death at age 14, his mother Mamie’s activism, and the acquittal of the two white men charged with Till’s murder in a Mississippi courthouse. The federally designated sites will be maintained and protected by the National Park Service, a White House official told the Chicago Tribune.

The monument to Till and his mother includes three sites in two states.

When Till’s mutilated body was shipped back to Chicago, his mother insisted on an open casket “for the world to see what they did to my boy.” Thousands filed past Till’s open casket at Robert Temple Church in Chicago’s historically Black Bronzeville neighborhood – the Illinois site in the monument. Photos published in Jet magazine of the Chicago teen’s engorged face lying in his open casket shocked white America and ignited the Civil Rights Movement.

The Mississippi locations include Graball Landing, the spot where Till’s body was believed to be pulled from the Tallahatchie River three days after his abduction, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Till’s killers were tried and acquitted. Eventually both white men – half-brothers Ray Bryant and J.B. Milam – admitted to Till’s murder to a Look magazine reporter.

The monument is the fourth that the president has created since taking office in 2021 commemorating the young Till and his mother, including signing into law the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which makes lynching a federal hate crime.

In April, Argo Community High School in Summit, Ill., unveiled a life-sized, bronze statue honoring Mamie Till Mobley, a distinguished alumni. Till-Mobley was the first Black student to make the A Honor Roll and only the fourth Black student to graduate from Argo.