Images of Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument – Mississippi, taken in June 2024.

A new national monument created in 2023, the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument includes the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, Illinois where Emmett Till’s open casket funeral was held in September 1955; Graball Landing, where Emmitt Till’s disfigured body was found, and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse where two white men were acquitted of murdering Emmitt Till, the latter two sites are both in Mississippi.

In August of 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmitt Till from Chicago, Illinois, on a trip to visit family in Mississippi, was accused of flirting with a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market. That night Byant’s husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam kidnapped, beat, shot and killed Emmitt Till, tied a seventy-pound fan blade to his neck using barbed wire and dumped his disfigured body into the Tallahatchie River at Graball Landing.

Once Emmitt Till's body was recovered, his mother Mamie Till-Mobley had the body transported back to Chicago for the funeral, insisting on an open casket to show the world what Bryant and Milam had done to her son.

In September, Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all-white male jury at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse after deliberating for only sixty-seven minutes. One of the jurors stated that it would have taken less time had they not stopped to drink sodas. In January of 1956, Bryant and Milam confessed to the murder of Emmitt Till in a Look magazine interview. Outrage over the confession as well as the national media exposure over the open casket funeral set off a chain of events that culminated in the modern American Civil Rights Movement.

Inexplicably, that movement is still essential in this day and age…