WASHINGTON —
U.S. President Joe Biden designated a new national monument Tuesday to memorialize the racist 1950s lynching of Emmett Till, and challenged Americans to confront their dark history or risk repeating the past.
“We should know about our country. We should know everything,” Biden said at a White House ceremony attended by lawmakers and Till family members, including the last surviving witness to his abduction, prior to torture and murder.
The monument honors Till, a 14-year-old Black boy snatched by white men in 1955 after he allegedly whistled at a white shopkeeper’s wife in Mississippi. It also honors his mother Mamie Till-Mobley, who turned the tragedy into a focal point for the nascent civil rights movement.
Signed on the 82nd anniversary of Till’s birth, Biden’s proclamation preserves three historic sites in Illinois and Mississippi.
One is the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where a huge crowd viewed Till’s mutilated body at the funeral after Mamie Till-Mobley insisted on leaving the casket open, saying Americans should see what had been done.
Another will be the Tallahatchie, Mississippi, courthouse where an all-white jury acquitted the men accused of murdering Till, although they would later admit to the crime.
The spot on the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi where Till’s battered body was eventually discovered also enters the memorial. Signs commemorating the brutal event there and in other locations around Tallahatchie County have repeatedly been defaced and vandalized over the years.
Source : VOA News