This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated August 4, 2023
President Biden signed a proclamation Tuesday, July 25, creating the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument. The date marked the 82nd anniversary of Emmett Till’s birth. Till, was kidnapped, brutalized, and lynched on August 28, 1955, at the age of 14, in a racially motivated crime in Mississippi.
Till was from Chicago and visiting family in Mississippi at the time. A white female clerk in a grocery store accused him of whistling at her and making unwanted advances. Two white men were arrested and tried for the murder but acquitted by an all-white jury. Within a few months, during a paid interview, both men proudly confessed to torturing and killing Till. In 2017, the woman who accused Emmett Till of making inappropriate advances confessed to a historian that those details were false.
Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett’s mother, showed extraordinary courage and grief in the aftermath of her son’s barbaric mother. Over 100,000 people paid their respects at Emmett Till’s funeral in Chicago. His mother insisted on an open-casket, saying, “I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.” A photo that was published at the time in Jet magazine and numerous other African-American publications, but not in mainstream national media, shows a body so brutalized that it barely looked human anymore.
In her keynote address at the signing ceremony, Vice-president Kamala Harris pointed out that “Just yesterday in the state of Florida, they decided middle school students will be taught that enslaved people benefited from slavery,” referring to new educational standards put in place by appointees of Gov. DeSantis that require if slavery is taught in Florida schools, students must also be told that “slaves developed skills” that could be used for “personal benefit.”
“It is not that I dwell on the past. But the past shapes the way we are in the present and the way we will become what we are destined to become.”
Mamie Till-Mobley from the 2003 book she co-wrote, ‘Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America’
Monuments are important in remembering the past, especially in a present when so many seem to be forgetting – or trying to get the public forget — our nation’s troubling history of slavery and racism. Biden’s proclamation establishes a national monument covering three sites in Illinois and Mississippi that were significant in Till’s life and brutal death. They are testaments to the boy, the lynching that took his life, and the fortitude of his mother, all of which Rosa Parks cited as inspiration for her deciding not to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama a few months later.
There will, obviously, be no monuments to the men who murdered Emmett Till because monuments are intended to honor individuals and mark significant historical moments. That is why any arguments intended to defend the continued display of honorifics to confederate figures, who fought against the United States military in a seditious civil war with the intention of preserving slavery, is total nonsense.
We dealt with just that here in Southern Brooklyn. For years, community lobbied for a plaque honoring Robert E. Lee near Fort Hamilton army base be removed and for the U.S. Army to rename General Lee Avenue inside the base. Conversely, some parroted the rhetoric we always hear in response to efforts to remove confederate honorifics, stating that these monuments and street names are just a way for the public to learn history.
After a decades-long career in the U.S. Army, Lee chose to take up arms against the Unite States, leading Confederate troops in a war that would claimed 620,000 Americans, with the United States Army suffering more than 150,00 casualties in battles led by Lee. Lee’s own cruelty as a slave owner is well-documented.
Fortunately, here in southern Brooklyn, we have seen strides in the right direction the past few years. The plaque honoring Lee was removed in August of 2017. In May of 2022, General Lee Avenue was renamed John Warren Avenue, in honor of an African American war hero from Brooklyn who died in Vietnam while using his body to shield the platoon he led from an enemy grenade.
The establishment of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument came about five months after Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law, which finally established lynching as a federal hate crime, a legislative battle that has lasted over a century. We cannot change the darkest moments from our national history, but we can take steps to help each successive generation become aware of them, while ensuring we do not honor the perpetrators of these events.
