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Everything you should know about Emmett Till’s unending story
President Biden to establish national monument honoring Emmett Till on July 25
© Getty Images
One of the most notorious crimes in America's history was the lynching of Emmett Louis Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy in Mississippi, during the summer of 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman.
The impact it left helped galvanize the civil rights movement, and now in 2023 President Joe Biden plans to name a new national monument after Till, on July 25, which would have been Till’s 82nd birthday. “The new monument will protect places that tell the story of Emmett Till’s too-short life and racially-motivated murder, the unjust acquittal of his murderers, and the activism of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who courageously brought the world’s attention to the brutal injustices and racism of the time, catalyzing the civil rights movement,” a White House official said, per CNN. The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument will be centered in Illinois and Mississippi, the states where Till was from and killed, respectively.
This follows Biden's initiative which kicked off in March 2022 when the US Congress finally approved the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, with Biden signing it into law on March 29. The act follows more than 200 failed attempts to outlaw lynching. For the first time ever, it made lynching a federal hate crime in the US, the maximum sentence of which is 30 years.
To this day, the sign marking where Till's body was pulled from the river displays bullet holes in a flagrant and startling display of how much work the US still needs to do to eradicate the fatal racism among its population. Click through this gallery for everything you need to know about the incident credited with sparking the modern civil rights movement, and why the case, though officially closed, remains open.
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