July 25 (UPI) — U.S. President Joe Biden signed a proclamation designating three national memorials for civil-rights icon Emmett Till and his mother Mamie Till-Mobley on Tuesday.
“We gather to remember an act of astonishing violence and hate and to honor the courage of those who called upon on our nation to look with open eyes at that horror and to act,” Biden said at a signing ceremony at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Tuesday.
“The story of Emmett Till and the incredible bravery of Mamie Till-Mobley helped fuel the movement for civil rights in America, and their stories continue to inspire our collectible fight for justice,” Biden said.
In 1955, Till was accused of whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, and was subsequently killed by her husband, Roy Bryant, and J.W. Milam. Neither man was convicted at trial.
Mamie Till-Mobley made the difficult choice of holding an open-casket funeral for her battered and disfigured 14-year-old son and allowed journalists from Jet Magazine and the Chicago Defender to photograph his body.
Mamie Till-Mobley became a prominent figure in the civil rights movement and continued her advocacy until her death in 2003.
Bryant and Milam were both acquitted of the killing by an all-white jury but later admitted to the crime in a 1956 interview with Look Magazine.
Carolyn Bryant admitted that her accusation was false decades later.
The locations chosen for the monuments are significant to the story of Till’s killing and its aftermath.
One of the monuments will be built at Graball Landing in Tallahatchie County, Miss., which is where Till’s body was discovered in 1955.
A second monument will be built at the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Miss., which is where Bryant and Milam were acquitted for the murder.
And a third monument will be built at the Temple Church of God in Christ, on the south side of Chicago Ill., which is where Till’s funeral was held.
On Sunday, a groundbreaking ceremony also was held for a museum that will be constructed at the location of Till’s childhood home on Saint Lawrence Street in Chicago, Ill.
On Tuesday, the Rev. Al Sharpton, a longtime civil-rights advocate and head of the National Action Network, said he understood how “painful’ it was for Till-Mobley to show her son’s body at this funeral.
“I had the distinct honor of knowing Mamie Till-Mobley, who had visited the National Action Network’s Harlem headquarters and shared her fight for Emmett,” Sharpton said. “I remember her telling me how painful it was to make the decision of keeping his casket open, so everyone could see her maimed and mortally wounded son. Little did she know that her difficult choice, one no parent should have to make, sparked the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.”
