Emmett Till Monument Has a Message Some Refuse to Hear
Analysis by Francis Wilkinson | Bloomberg
July 29, 2023 

US President Joe Biden while signing a proclamation to establish the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in theIndian Treaty Room of the White House with US Vice President Kamala Harris, left, in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, July 25, 2023. Biden signed the proclamation to protect sites connected to the barbaric 1955 killing ofEmmett Tilland the bold efforts by his mother, MamieTill-Mobley, to highlight his death. (Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg)

History has been getting roughed up lately. But it fought back this week, aided by a president who has seen a lot of it.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced the creation of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument. It will honor a 14-year-old boy who was tortured and murdered by racists in 1955, and a mother who courageously displayed her son’s mutilated face to expose a savage society. (The White woman who claimed that Till had accosted her — the ostensible basis for the vigilantism — six decades later said she had lied about the incident. Not that it matters.)

The monument, set to occupy three locations, will establish an observable physical fact, the better to preserve and honor an historical fact. If the message of monuments such as the Lincoln Memorial is, more or less, Behold the great man, the message of the Till monument will be slightly different: It happened. Deal with it.

Millions of Americans emphatically do not want to deal with it. In the days leading up to Biden’s announcement, Republican attorneys general from 13 states sent a letter to the nearly all-White ranks of Fortune 100 CEOs. The Republicans threatened “serious legal consequences” for executives if their companies seek to ameliorate racial disadvantage through programs or philosophies that acknowledge there might be something awry, possibly even systemic, in racial disparities of wealth and power.

One of the letter’s Republican signatories is Lynn Fitch, attorney general of Mississippi, the state that spawned both Till’s killers and the local jury that blessed their violence. Fitch was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1961, between the killing of Till, in Money, Mississippi, in 1955, and the murder of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963. She was 2 years old at the time of the murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964.

Thankfully, all such traces of unpleasantness have vanished for Fitch, whose wealthy family’s plantation features the home of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general famous for torturing Black Union soldiers and founding the Ku Klux Klan. Fitch’s father paid to move the structure to his property and carefully restore it.

Median household income for Black residents in Mississippi is less than 60% of the median for White residents. With racial equality achieved at home, Fitch is looking elsewhere, wielding the power of the state to combat “overt and pervasive racial discrimination” against the White people who can’t get ahead in corporate America.

There is pathos in these efforts. It was a straightforward matter for the White Citizens Council to extol the virtues of White supremacy and facilitate murder in its sacred honor. White privilege is a trickier game now, requiring the maintenance of racial stratification under the guise of commitment to a colorblind society. Unwilling to acknowledge racism’s reach, yet loath to indulge in stereotypes, Republicans are at a loss to explain the vast disparity between White and Black wealth. What drives this curious phenomenon? Apparently, it’s the residue that remains after systemic disadvantage evaporates.

Conservatives are working hard to reconfigure the past, but they pay a cost. Florida officials, including Governor Ron DeSantis, look awfully dim banning books and defending a hackish public education curriculum asserting that American slaves learned valuable skills in bondage. But minimizing the depravity of slavery, and erasing the long tail of racism, helps preserve the fantasies, and policies, of White innocence that buffer the haves against the aspirations of the have-so-much-less. If you can distort the past, you can gaslight the present.

If the manufacture, finance and consumption of cotton is a foundation of the modern capitalist world and its wealth, the question what is owed can’t help but assert itself. There are children in posh schools in Boston, London and New York whose family fortunes were built on the lacerated backs of slaves whose progeny now live across town. Does that matter? If so, what is to be done about it? If it doesn’t matter, why so much huffing and puffing to bury the truth?

What is owed is not the only, or necessarily even most important, question. And the past is not the only arena. Contemporary racial politics is very much about contemporary public and political space, too. The ultimate affront of Barack Obama’s presidency wasn’t his expansion of access to health care. It was that a Black man took up so very much space, at the center of the public stage.

DeSantis, the 13 attorneys general and their cohorts seek to preserve center stage for those who traditionally occupied it. Yet Blacks, Native Americans, women, LGBTQ Americans and others keep butting into the picture. Donald Trump was mocked for his pathetic affirmation of Frederick Douglass as someone who’s “done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.” But Trump’s ignorance was a distillation of his creed. Why should Trump know anything about Douglass? Douglass was Black. 

Biden understands that the battle over history is a battle for the future. “At 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 during a White House event with members of the Till family. The politics of highlighting Mamie Till-Mobley, along with her son, aren’t hard to fathom: Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party.

A few conservative truth-tellers — evangelical leader Russell Moore is one who comes to mind — seem eager to lead their reluctant brethren to the promised land, where no one mistakes MAGA’s racial aggression for sappy victimhood. Their path leads to places like the National Memorial for Peace and Justice — the lynching memorial — in Montgomery, Alabama.

The Till memorial will likely be another such destination, a place to face the past instead of lie about it. Maybe there, in the silent memory of Emmett Till’s mangled body, we can begin to dispense with another lie — the notion that slavery was the “original sin” of America’s founding. No God imprinted such horror at birth. No human action was foreordained. Every crime was a decision.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy. Previously, he was an editor for the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.