US President Joe Biden has signed a proclamation establishing a national monument honouring Emmett Till – the black teenager who was killed in 1955 after he was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi – and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley.
It marked the fulfilment of a promise Till’s relatives made after his death 68 years ago.
The teenager from Chicago, whose abduction, torture and killing helped to propel the civil rights movement, will be seen as more than just a cause of that movement, said Till’s cousin the Rev Wheeler Parker Jr.
“We are resolute that it now becomes an American story and not just a civil rights story,” Rev Parker told The Associated Press, ahead of the proclamation signing ceremony at the White House attended by other family members, members of Congress and civil rights leaders.
With the stroke of Mr Biden’s pen, the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, located across three sites in two states, became federally protected places.
But Till’s family members, along with a national organisation seeking to preserve black cultural heritage sites, say their work protecting the Till legacy continues.
They hope to raise money to restore the sites and develop educational programming to support their inclusion in the National Park System.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Monday that the Till national monument will be the Biden-Harris administration’s fourth designation that reflects their “work to advance civil rights”.
The move comes as conservative leaders, mostly at the state and local levels, push legislation that limits the teaching of slavery and black history in public schools.
The Democratic president’s administration “will continue to speak out against hateful attempts to rewrite our history and strongly oppose any actions that threaten to divide us and take our country backwards”, Ms Jean-Pierre said.
Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a programme of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said the federal designation is a milestone in a years-long effort to preserve and protect places tied to events that have shaped the nation and that symbolise national wounds.
“We believe that not until black history matters will black lives and black bodies matter,” he said. “Through reckoning with America’s racist past, we have the opportunity to heal.”
The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund has provided 750,000 dollars (£582,500) in grant funding since 2017 to help rescue sites important to the Till legacy.
With its partners, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Lilly Endowment Inc, Mr Leggs said an additional five million dollars (£3.9 million) in funding has been secured for specialised preservation of the sites.
Mr Biden’s proclamation protects places that are central to the story of Emmett Till’s life and death at age 14, the acquittal of his white killers by an all-white jury and his late mother’s activism.
In the summer of 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley put her son Emmett on a train to her native Mississippi, where he was to spend time with his uncle and his cousins. Overnight on August 28, 1955, Emmett was taken from his uncle’s home at gunpoint by two white men.
Three days later, a fisherman on the Tallahatchie River discovered the teenager’s bloated corpse — one of his eyes was detached, an ear was missing and he had been shot in the head.
Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother JW Milam, were tried on murder charges about a month after Emmett was killed, but an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted them.
Ms Till-Mobley demanded that Emmett’s mutilated remains be taken back to Chicago for a public, open casket funeral that was attended by tens of thousands of people. Graphic images taken of Emmett’s remains, sanctioned by his mother, were published by Jet magazine and propelled the civil rights movement.
The Till national monument will include 5.7 acres of land and two historic buildings. The Mississippi sites are Graball Landing, the spot where Emmett’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River just outside Glendora, Mississippi, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Emmett’s killers were tried.
There is already the Emmett Till Interpretive Centre in Sumner, which received philanthropic funding to expand programming and pay staff.
The Illinois site is Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Emmett’s funeral was held in September 1955.
In a statement, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin saluted Mamie Till-Mobley’s courage to have the nation and the world bear witness to the scourge of racial hatred. The monument, he said, helps “ensure that Emmett Till’s story is not forgotten”.
For Rev Parker, who was 16 years old when he witnessed Emmett’s abduction, the Till monument proclamation begins to lift the weight of trauma that he has carried for most of his life. Tuesday is the anniversary of Emmett’s birth in 1941. He would have been 82.
“I’ve been suffering for all these years of how they’ve portrayed him — I still deal with that,” Rev Parker, 84, said of his cousin.
“The truth should carry itself, but it doesn’t have wings. You have to put some wings on it.”
