New National Monument Will Honor Emmett Till

President Biden will establish a national monument honoring Emmett Till, the Black teenager from Chicago who was abducted, tortured, and killed in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, per the AP. Biden will sign a proclamation on Tuesday to create the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument across three sites in Illinois and Mississippi, according to a White House official. Tuesday is the anniversary of Emmett Till's birth in 1941. The monument will protect places that are central to the story of Till's life and death at age 14, the acquittal of his white killers, and the activism of his mother, Mamie.

Till's mother's insistence on an open casket to show the world how her son had been brutalized and Jet magazine's decision to publish photos of his mutilated body helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement. The monument to Till and his mother will include three sites in the two states:

• Illinois: The Illinois site is Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville, a historically Black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Thousands of people gathered at the church to mourn Emmett Till in September 1955.
• Mississippi: The Mississippi locations are Graball Landing, believed to be where Till's mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Till's killers were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury.

Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when Carolyn Bryant Donham said Till whistled and made sexual advances at her while she worked in a store in the small community of Money. Till was later abducted and his body eventually pulled from the Tallahatchie River, where he had been tossed after he was shot and weighted down with a cotton gin fan. Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, were tried on murder charges about a month after Till was killed, but an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted them. Months later, they confessed to killing Till in a paid interview with Look magazine. Bryant was married to Donham in 1955. She died earlier this year.

(More Emmett Till stories.)