President Biden  named a new national monument Tuesday honoring Emmett Till and his mother amid a national debate over how to teach painful facts about American history in classrooms.

“In a time when there are those who seek to ban books, bury history, we’re making it clear, crystal, crystal clear:

While darkness and denialism can hide much, they erase nothing,” Biden said at the White House, where he and members of the Till family gathered to formally approve the new monument.

“We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know,” Biden said from the Indian Treaty Room. “We have to learn what we should know. We should know about our country. We should know everything. 

The good, the bad, the truth. Who we are as a nation.”Till was a Black teenager whose murder in 1955 helped galvanize the civil rights movement.

Biden designated the monument on what would have been Till’s 82nd birthday.His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral so visitors could see her son’s body, mangled beyond recognition – a decision that bravely resisted sanitizing the brutality of racism, allowing the world to see.

Last edited by Spunky (7/25/2023 3:27 pm)