Photo Credit:AP Photo/ Manuel Balce Ceneta

President Biden is set to make a significant move this week by establishing a national monument in honor of Emmett Till, the Black teenager from Chicago whose tragic lynching in Mississippi in 1955 played a pivotal role in igniting the civil rights movement.

According to a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity, President Biden will sign a proclamation on Tuesday to create the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, encompassing three sites located in Illinois and Mississippi. The decision comes on the anniversary of Emmett Till’s birth in 1941.

CBS News reported on Saturday that they had received advance notice of President Biden’s planned announcement on Tuesday.

Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till, had insisted on an open casket funeral to expose the brutalization her 14-year-old son endured, and the publication of photos of his mutilated body in Jet magazine served as a powerful catalyst for the civil rights movement.

The first site in Illinois is the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, located in Bronzeville, a historically Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. It was at this church that thousands of people gathered to mourn Emmett Till in September 1955.

The other two sites are in Mississippi: Graball Landing, believed to be the place where Till’s mutilated body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Till’s accused killers were brought to trial and ultimately acquitted.

Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was accused by Carolyn Bryant Donham of whistling at and making sexual advances towards her while she was working in a store in the small community of Money.

Shortly thereafter, Till was abducted, shot, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton gin fan tied to his body to weigh him down.

Although two White men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, were tried for murder about a month after Till’s death, an all-White Mississippi jury acquitted them. However, they later confessed to the killing in a paid interview with Look magazine. Bryant, who was married to Carolyn Bryant Donham in 1955, passed away earlier this year.

In December 2021, the Justice Department announced that it was closing its investigation into Till’s killing. And in 2022, a grand jury in Mississippi declined to indict Donham, citing insufficient evidence to bring kidnapping and manslaughter charges against the woman, who was by then in her 80s.

Source: Fox News