The United States Senate plans to award the late Emmett Till and his mother Mamie Till-Mobley posthumously with the Congressional Gold Medal with the passing of a new bill.
Two white racist men named J.W. Milan and Roy Bryant murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till back in 1955 after a racist white woman lied on Emmett, claiming the teen whistled at her. At the time, Emmett was visiting family in rural Mississippi from Chicago over the summer. Four days later, white supremacists kidnapped Emmett, brutally beat him and lynched him. Using barbed wire, the men then tied a large metal fan to Emmett’s neck and tossed him in the Tallahatchie River.
Like many killings of Black people still today, the men were acquitted by an all-white jury months after the teen was killed, even though Emmett’s uncle was an eyewitness to the murder. While devastated by her son’s murder, Till-Mobley took it upon herself to honor Emmett by dedicating herself to social justice. Till-Mobley’s decision to have an open-casket ceremony for Emmett’s funeral shook the world and opened closed eyes to the harsh realities of racism in America. “I wanted the world to see what they did to my boy,” Till-Mobley, who passed away in 2003, was recorded saying.
This past Tuesday, a bill that was created to honor Emmett and his mother was set into law, PEOPLE reports. “At the age of 14, Emmett Till was abducted and lynched at the hands of white supremacists. His gruesome murder still serves as a solemn reminder of the terror and violence experienced by Black Americans throughout our nation’s history,” said Sen. Cory Booker, one of the sponsors of the bill.
“The courage and activism demonstrated by Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, in displaying to the world the brutality endured by her son helped awaken the nation’s conscience, forcing America to reckon with its failure to address racism and the glaring injustices that stem from such hatred,” he continued.
The efforts of Till-Mobley’s Emmett Till Justice Campaign led to the re-investigation of Emmett’s murder and the passing of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007, which was passed in 2007. The law legally requires the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate cold cases from the civil rights era.
