President Biden established a national monument to Emmett Till and his mother Tuesday, nearly seven decades after the Chicago teenager was lynched by a white mob in a small Mississippi town during the Jim Crow era.
Biden said Emmett‘s brutal murder remains an invaluable lesson in today’s still-divided America.
“On what would have been Emmett’s 82nd birthday, we add another chapter to the story of remembrance and healing,” Biden said.
“We should know everything [about our country]: the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation,” BIden said. “For only with truth comes healing, justice, repair.”
Biden rejected recent efforts to sanitize the nation’s checkered racial history or to accuse those who fight against modern-day racism of being less than patriotic Americans.
“[It’s] another step forward toward forming a more perfect Union,” he said. “We got a helluva long way to go.”
Flanked by Vice President Kamala Harris and an elderly cousin of Emmett’s, Biden also paid tribute to the slain teenager’s late mother, Mamie Till-Mobley.
He struggled to put himself in the shoes of the brave and defiant Black mom who insisted on displaying her slain son’s mangled body in an open casket so the world would see the brutality of American segregation.
“I can’t fathom what it must have been like,” Biden said. “She said, ‘Let the people see what I’ve seen.’ My God.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton said the Till national monument designation proves “that out of pain comes power.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the monument a powerful riposte to those who would prefer to forget the nation’s history, specifically calling out Florida education officials who approved a curriculum claiming slaves obtained valuable skills while they were held captive.
“In the face of efforts to erase and rewrite Black history, including in Florida, it is essential to make sure that stories like Emmett Till’s are told and not forgotten,” Jeffries (D-Brooklyn) said in a written statement. “Black history is American history.”
Emmett Till was 14 in 1955 when his mother sent him to stay with relatives in Mississippi for the summer.
He was abducted, tortured, murdered and dumped in a river by a white mob after one of the men accused the Black teen of flirting with his wife. An all-white jury acquitted the accused killers.
The monument to Emmett and his mother will be established in three locations: the church on Chicago’s South Side where his funeral was held; the courtroom in Mississippi where the alleged killers were cleared, and the spot on the banks of the nearby Tallahatchie River where Emmett’s mutilated body was recovered.
