Biden Establishes National Monuments in Honor of Emmett Till and His Mother, Mamie Till-Mobley

President Joe Biden today established a national monument in honor of Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, on what would have been Till’s 82nd birthday. The monument will comprise three protected sites, one in Chicago, Till’s hometown, and two in Mississippi, where the Black teenager was kidnapped, tortured, and killed by two white men.

The monument includes Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ on Chicago’s South Side, where Till’s funeral was held in 1955. Till-Mobley famously insisted on an open-casket service, showing the 100,000 attendees—and the world, by way of photographs published in Jet magazine—the brutality her son suffered at the hands of his murderers.

“They had to see what I had seen,” she wrote in her memoir. 

Her subsequent activism helped galvanize the Civil Rights movement, and in 2022, Congress posthumously presented Till and Till-Mobley, who died in 2003, with the Congressional Gold Medal.

The Mississippi sites are Graball Landing in Tallahatchie County, where Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, where Till’s murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury. The two suspects later confessed to killing Till, as an acquittal in the United States ensures immunity from a second prosecution for the same crime.

In 2008, eight signs telling Till’s story were installed in northwest Mississippi, including one in Graball Landing. Most have been vandalized over the years, in particular the Graball Landing sign which was replaced by a bulletproof version in 2019. 

The death of Emmett Till in 1955 is one of the most notorious crimes committed against a Black American in the years leading up to the Civil Rights movement. Till, then 14 years old, was visiting relatives in Mississippi when a white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, accused him of whistling at her. 

Bryant Donham’s then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. Milam, later abducted Till from his relatives’ home, then tortured and shot him, and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River. Last year, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Bryant Donham on charges of kidnapping or manslaughter. She died in April.