Biden to establish monument to Emmett Till

President Joe Biden is scheduled to designate a national monument honoring the memory of civil rights icon Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Biden’s designation of the monument takes place as education about Black history has come under attack by Republicans, including bans on books written by prominent Black authors.

The Associated Press reported that on July 25, which would have been Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday, Biden will sign a proclamation designating a national monument consisting of three sites, in Illinois and Mississippi, that are related to Till’s life and death.

In 1955, when he was 14, Till was abducted, tortured and lynched in Mississippi for purportedly offending a white woman. His mother asked for an open-casket funeral so that the public could see the way his body had been brutalized by his murderers. A reported 50,000 people attended his funeral in Chicago, and photos of his corpse were subsequently published nationally in Jet magazine. The events became a rallying point for the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality within the United States.

In addition to the upcoming designations, in 2022 Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which made lynching a federal hate crime, and in 2021 signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, which created a federal holiday marking Juneteenth, commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S.

At the same time, prominent Republicans continue their efforts to undermine the teaching of Black history.

Former President Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has said that if he is elected president again, he would cut federal funding for schools that teach what he and other Republicans call “critical race theory.”

“Critical race theory” is a term used in academic circles for the study of systemic racism; recently it has been used as a catchall phrase by conservatives to attack educational programs that include lessons on racism and diversity in the United States.

Throughout his presidency, Trump repeatedly embraced and used racist rhetoric and was widely condemned for referring to neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”

In 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s leading rival for the presidential nomination, pushed for and signed the “Stop Woke Act.” The law bans educational institutions in Florida from using a curriculum that could, in its words, instruct a person “that he or she must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress for actions, in which he or she played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex.”

The law has resulted in recently announced educational standards in Florida that will require students to learn what they call “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Following a public outcry over the standards, DeSantis defended them.

“They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said on July 21 in response to questions from reporters. He also described the policy as “the most robust standards in African American history probably anywhere in the country.”

On the same day, Vice President Kamala Harris said in a speech at the Ritz Theatre and Museum in Jacksonville that the curriculum was “an abject and purposeful and intentional policy to mislead our children.”

The law signed by DeSantis has been used to ban books from school libraries, including works by Black and LGBTQ authors and books on Black history. A book authored by poet Amanda Gorman, who spoke at Biden’s inauguration, was pulled from a Florida school system, along with biographies of Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente and Celia Cruz.

Over the last two years, Texas and Oklahoma have also banned books dealing with race and civil rights.

Moms for Liberty, a conservative organization described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an “antigovernment extremist group,” has led the charge for many of these book bans through its local chapters.

The group held an event in Philadelphia in June to rally conservatives ahead of the 2024 presidential election. In attendance were Trump and DeSantis, along with fellow presidential candidates Gov. Nikki Haley, Gov. Asa Hutchinson and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.