Biden to establish national monument honoring Black teen lynched in Mississippi

Washington, The Gulf Observer: President Joe 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, and his mother, a White House official said.

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, the official said on Saturday.

The individual spoke on condition of anonymity because the White House had not formally announced the president’s plans.

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 his mother’s activism.

Till’s mother’s insistence on an open casket to show the world how her son had been brutalised and Jet’s magazine’s decision to publish photos of his mutilated body helped galvanise the Civil Rights Movement.

Biden’s decision also comes at a fraught time in the United States over matters concerning race.

Conservative leaders are pushing back against the teaching of slavery and Black history in public schools, as well as the incorporation of diversity, equity and inclusion programmes from college classrooms to corporate boardrooms.

On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris criticised a revised Black history curriculum in Florida that includes teaching that enslaved people benefited from the skills they learned at the hands of the people who denied them freedom.

The Florida Board of Education approved the curriculum to satisfy legislation signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate who has accused public schools of liberal indoctrination.

“How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Harris asked in a speech delivered from Jacksonville, Florida.

DeSantis said he had no role in devising his state’s new education standards but defended the components on how enslaved people benefited.

“All of that is rooted in whatever is factual,” he said in response.