WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden signed a proclamation Tuesday to establish the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, immediately creating a National Park Service site at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where the mutilated body of Till, a Black youth lynched by white men in Mississippi — in an open casket — sparked the modern civil rights movement.
As the late civil rights icon John Lewis, the Georgia congressman, noted, Till, murdered in 1955, was the George Floyd of his day. Floyd, a Black man beaten to death by police officers in Minneapolis in 2020, ushered in a new era of reckoning dealing with racial violence, policing, discrimination and equity.
