Mississippi Unveils Emmett Till Memorial Statue: ‘Affirmation That Our Lives Matter’

A statute of the late Emmett Till has been unveiled in Mississippi.

Hundreds joined Friday as the city of Greenwood displayed a nine-foot bronze statue of Till in the downtown Rail Spike Park, about 40 miles south of the town where the 14-year-old Black teen was kidnapped, beaten, and lynched in 1955.

“This is a great day as we take another leap forward in recognizing the life and legacy of Emmett Till,” Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. told ABC News. Parker. Parker is Till’s only surviving family member who saw him the night he was kidnapped.

“As so many people are determined to erase our history, we are blessed to have so many more allies in the struggle to keep our story alive,” Parker added. “This statue is affirmation that our lives matter.”

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The monument features a likeness of Till’s iconic black-and-white portrait, wearing a button-down shirt and tie while tipping his hat, and was commissioned by Utah sculptor Matt Glenn, PEOPLE reported.

“I feel that when young people ask me what the memory of Emmett Till is, we have this statue as a memory,” said state Sen. David Jordan, who represents Greenwood and allocated $150,000 in state funding for the statue. “He liberated all Black people for all that he sacrificed.”

The statue comes after a historical marker was removed in 2019 at the site where his body was found. The previous memorial had become a place for racist attacks and had been both vandalized and riddled with bullet holes on multiple occasions.

Till was killed while visiting family members in Money, Miss.

Shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant Donham, a 21-year-old white woman, claimed that Till, a teen at the time, whistled and grabbed her inside her family’s grocery store on Aug. 24, 1955.

Several days later, he was kidnapped from his relative’s home in the middle of the night before he was beaten and lynched. His body was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River. It had been weighted down by a metal fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.

Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and Bryant’s half-brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted after an hour-long deliberation by an all-white, all-male jury. However, the two later confessed to the killing in an interview.

A biopic of his life story, Till, will be released in select theaters on October 28.

A statue honoring Emmett Till now stands in Greenwood, Mississippi, just miles from where the teenager was murdered 67 years ago. Hundreds of people gathered Friday for the unveiling of the nine-foot-tall bronze image. pic.twitter.com/kqPYIV4RgW

— CBS Saturday Morning (@cbssaturday) October 22, 2022