On this date, August 28, in 1955, young Emmett Till was kidnapped and brutally murdered in a lynching that shocked the nation and shamed the USA in the eyes of much of the world.
In 2023, president Biden finalized the designation of a National Historic site memorializing this lynching and its aftermath as the catalyst for much of the national civil rights movement which shook the pillars of southern racism.
Here is an excerpt from the description of the historic monument, and its recounting of this gripping story.
Below that is text and photos from an earlier blog post about this and another notorious racial murder.
Take a few moments to read and remember.
Introduction
In August and September of 1955, a series of tragic events in rural Mississippi and Chicago’s South Side brought a 14-year-old African American boy’s lynching to national attention. Emmett Till’s kidnapping, murder, and funeral marked a turning point in America’s understanding of racist violence. Mamie Till-Mobley’s courage in showing the brutality done to her son highlighted racial injustice and helped inspire the modern civil rights movement.
Mississippi Beginnings
Mamie Till-Mobley (née Carthan) was born in Webb, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. At the age of two, her family relocated to the Chicago Area, eventually settling in Argo-Summit. Their move was part of the Great Migration, an exodus ignited by violence and widespread economic, social, and political disparities that African Americans were experiencing in the South. After graduating from high school, she married Louis Till. Their only child, Emmett, was born in 1941. Known as a fun-loving jokester, Emmett spent his childhood in Argo-Summit, then Chicago’s South Side. Though polio left him with a stutter, his illness did not diminish his enthusiasm for life.
Everything changed in 1955, the summer before Emmett was to enter 8th grade. That year, Emmett begged to go south to spend part of his vacation with family in Mississippi.
A Visit to the Delta
“I emphasized over and over again to him that it was not the same as Argo or Chicago and he had to be extra careful to avoid getting in trouble with white people.” —Mamie Till-Mobley, Chicago Defender, 1956
Emmett arrived by train to Mississippi on Sunday, August 21, and went to stay at the home of his great uncle Moses (Mose) Wright outside of Money. . . . Read the rest and explore the site here.
An Update to a blog post from 2018:
Some Folks aren’t satisfied with killing people of color; they want to kill the memory of these murders too.
Take Emmett Till, Kidnapped & murdered in Mississippi in 1955, after someone said the 14 year-old may have whistled at a white woman. His tortured body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River days later; it took a jury one hour to acquit the men charged with the killing. Outrage generated by the case gave a boost to civil rights struggles.
In 2007, county leaders established the Emmett Till Interpretive Center to memorialize Till and remember the case and what it represented. The center erected a sign in a rural area near the bank of the river where Till’s body was recovered. But that sign was soon stolen and never recovered.
A second sign was put up. before long, it was full of bullet holes.
This sign was eventually moved inside the Center, itself becoming an object for reflection. And not long ago, a new sign was put up.
The new sign is now collecting bullet holes. This image is only a few days old.
UPDATES: — July 24, 2023
Chicago Defender:
Biden To Establish National Monument Honoring Emmett Till
Black Information Network
President Joe Biden plans to create a national monument honoring Emmett Till, a Black teenager who was lynched in 1955 in Mississippi, and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, a White House official said.
On Tuesday (July 25, 2023), Biden is set to sign a proclamation on what would have been Till’s 82nd birthday, per BBC News. The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument will be established and include three different sites in Illinois and Mississippi
The monument to Till and his mother will include three sites in the two states.
The Illinois site is the 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.
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 the 14-year-old 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 JW 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.
NYT: In 2008, eight signs detailing Emmett’s story were installed in northwest Mississippi, including one in the area of Graball Landing. A year later, the sign at the spot on the river where Emmett’s body was discovered was stolen and thrown into the river. A replacement sign was soon marred with bullet holes. In 2018, another replacement was installed, but 35 days after it went up, it, too, was shot up. In 2019, a new, bulletproof sign was installed, along with a surveillance system.
The Art Newspaper: Several signs telling Till’s story were installed in Mississippi, including at Graball Landing, in 2008. The Graball Landing sign in particular was subject to vandalism multiple times over the years, finally resulting in the installation of a bulletproof replacement sign and a surveillance system in 2019. Last year, a Mississippi jury chose not to indict the white woman who had accused Till of whistling at her (and whose then-husband was one of the men who killed the teenager). She died earlier this year.
Also in 2022, the US Congress posthumously presented Till and Till-Mobley with the Congressional Gold Medal (Till-Mobley died in 2003), and Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law, officially defining lynching as a federal hate crime. Till’s casket is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.
Such posthumous assaults are not limited to Mississippi. In February, 1965, Jimmie Lee Jackson of Marion, Alabama, who was unarmed, was shot by a state trooper in an attack on a night march during the historic voting rights campaign based in nearby Selma,.
Jackson was buried in a small cemetery near Alabama Highway 14 on the outskirts of Marion. His large headstone is impressively carved with a figure of Jesus keeping vigil.
It too has been hit by numerous bullets. One knocked a chunk off the top, and seven or eight more are visible on close examination, in this 2015 photo.
Emmett Till’s killers walked completely free. The Alabama trooper who shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Fowler, shot and killed a second unarmed young black man in 1966. But forty-five years later, Fowler was convicted of manslaughter, and served several months in jail, before being released due to ill health.
The Emmett Till Interpretive Center, located in Sumner, Mississippi, has plans to expand its facility and programs, and upgrade security.
Memories aren’t bulletproof. But they don’t die easily.