Forever Connected: The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument

A few years back, Patrick Weems and his colleagues at the Emmett Till Interpretive Center (ETIC) put up a historical marker on the banks of the Tallahatchie River in rural Glendora, Mississippi, more than 100 miles north of Jackson.

It was placed at a location known as Graball Landing, there to commemorate the general area where, in 1955, a 14-year-old African American boy was found after having been lynched. The murder was an infamously grievous act of vigilantism in response to the allegation that the boy, named Emmett Till, had whistled at a white woman. 

When Weems went back a month later to check on the memorial to the young teen from Chicago who was kidnapped while visiting family, he found it riddled with bullet holes. The monument was victim to the kind of desecration that has befallen previous markers honoring Till at Graball Landing since 2008.  

“It was such a low moment. You work so hard to be able to tell this story, and then you have these setbacks. You see the worst of humanity,” says Weems, who lives in Cleveland, Mississippi, about 35 miles south of Sumner, where the Interpretive Center is based. 

Till’s story is a pivotal one in America’s struggle for racial justice, highlighting critical landmarks in its telling. What happened to him, and what his mother Mamie Till-Mobley chose to do in the wake of such tragedy, is often told through a disparate series of locations that can be challenging to piece together.  

Some students of history will be familiar with Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi, where Till was alleged to have whistled at its white shopkeeper, Carolyn Bryant.

They will likely also know about the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, roughly thirty minutes north of the grocery, where an all-white, all-male jury acquitted Bryant’s then-husband and his half-brother, both white men themselves, of the crime. The next year, the two men confessed to the crime in an interview with Look magazine. 

Others will have etched in their minds the image of Till’s open casket at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Till and his mother lived. Till-Mobley’s courageous declaration “Let the people see what they did to my boy” stands today as an imperative that changed the course of history and is widely believed to have catalyzed the modern civil rights movement.  

“It was this exposure that challenged the world to change,” says Dr. Marvel Parker, the executive director of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Institute (the Till Institute) in Illinois, which teamed up with ETIC, the National Park Foundation, National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, and other partners in a campaign to gain federal protection for Graball Landing, the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, and Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ.

Their joint effort was a success. In July 2023, they entered what Weems calls “the forever game” when President Joe Biden designated the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, granting this trio of non-contiguous landmarks federal protection in perpetuity.

Now the sites will work together to tell the story of a single and singular family in mid-century America, and to stand as vital signposts forever preserved in the cultural and political history of the United States.  

“Protecting this land is essential to preserving and sharing with future generations the story of the Till family and their tremendous impact on the evolution of the civil rights movement,” explains Ruth Hernandez Prescott, chief of staff at the National Park Foundation (NPF), the official nonprofit partner of the National Park Service. NPF facilitated a critical step in supporting the designation: the acquisition of the courthouse and, in collaboration with ETIC and other local partners, planning for its activation as an interpretive site. “Thanks to the National Park Service, this history will not be buried,” Hernandez Prescott says.  

To that end, ETIC hosts youth programs at the courthouse in Sumner, using a high school curriculum developed by the Till Institute. Both organizations partnered with University of Kansas to create an app for self-guided exploration of Till-related sites. Now that the sites are connected formally, a National Park Service ranger stationed in Mississippi will help facilitate public engagement with the fraught histories of racism, violence, and social justice that Till’s death invokes, issues that are still very much a part of American life. 

The Till family story unfolds across many more sites beyond those included in this designation. The Emmett Till Memorial Center in Summit, Illinois, just outside Chicago where Emmett Till largely grew up, also serves as an educational partner and offers a range of community and justice-oriented activities, teaching modern audiences about the family’s indelible connection to American history.

“When Emmett went to Mississippi in 1955, he had no idea that he was going behind an invisible iron curtain. He had no idea that he was going to an America that was different,” explains Dr. Parker. “The laws were different, the people were different, and you had to act different in order to stay alive. Even though his mother gave him a crash course in cultural socialization, it wasn’t enough.” 

To Dr. Parker, Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley are family. Her husband, the Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr., was Emmett’s cousin and best friend, and had traveled to Mississippi to accompany Till on that family visit. He witnessed his beloved cousin being roused in the middle of the night and kidnapped at gunpoint. It was the last time he would see Emmett Till. 

Now in his mid-80s, Rev. Parker Jr. is hopeful that the monument “will help America to grow” and will serve as “a truth bearer” relaying what really happened to his cousin. “It makes me feel good to know that the truth is out now,” he says. “I don’t feel helpless anymore.”