This coming Tuesday, President Joe Biden is expected to sign a proclamation establishing a national monument that will honor Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black teenager whose brutal murder in 1955 shocked the nation at the start of the Civil Rights Movement.
According to a report from The Associated Press, there will be three separate sites in Illinois and Mississippi for the Emmet Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument. The sites mark locations that are central to Till’s story.
CNN spoke with a White House official who is familiar with the upcoming proclamation, and they shared that the monument is meant to honor Till and his mother, who told his story after his death.
“The new monument will protect places that tell the story of Emmett Till’s too-short life and racially-motivated murder, the unjust acquittal of his murderers, and the activism of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who courageously brought the world’s attention to the brutal injustices and racism of the time, catalyzing the civil rights movement,” the official told CNN.
Till, a Chicago native, was famously abducted, abused, and lynched after he allegedly offended a white woman by allegedly whistling at her at a grocery store while visiting family on a summer trip in Mississippi.
After his body was returned home to Chicago, his mother held an open-casket funeral to display what had happened to her son and the brutality of his murder.
The first monument site will be the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, the Chicago-area church where Till’s funeral was held.
It will also include Graball Landing in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, where Till’s body is believed to have been pulled out of the Tallahatchie River, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Till’s murderers were acquitted.
The two white men found not guilty of Till’s murder, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were acquitted by an all-white jury in September 1955 but later admitted to the killing in an interview years later, the AP reported.
It has not yet been shared when the new monument will be constructed.
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