Battle of memory in the United States. Frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Ron DeSantis said last week that slavery has benefited slaves in some ways. The governor of Florida is accused of wanting to minimize certain racist aspects of the history of the United States in the textbooks of his state, considering himself to be fighting against the “virus” of “woke” values of the left.
The White House denounced DeSantis’ remarks, while announcing the creation of a national monument in memory of Emmett Till, a black teenager victim of a racist assassination in 1955. Joe Biden himself must make this announcement this Tuesday. In March 2022, the American president had also signed a law making lynching a federal crime, bearing the name of the boy.
Three historic sites in Illinois and Mississippi will form the memorial which is part of the fight against resurgent racism, the US executive said. Several signs commemorating the brutal murder at the scene of the event have been repeatedly vandalized over the years.
Abducted, beaten and shot
Born in Chicago in 1941, Emmett Till died at age 14 in Mississippi, a segregationist southern state where he was visiting family members. First accused of having whistled Carolyn Bryant, the white owner of a grocery store, to impress other teenagers, the rumor quickly lends him more equivocal gestures, even an affair with the young woman. When the latter’s husband, Roy, 29, returns from a business trip a few days later, the whole county knows about the scandal.
Roy Bryant then decides with his older half-brother to go and kidnap Emmett from his uncle, where he has been living for a week. The teenager was then beaten up in a plantation shed, driven to the edge of a river, forced to strip naked and shot in the head. Weighted down with a fan strapped to his neck with barbed wire, young Emmett’s body is thrown into the Tallahatchie River.
An emblematic affair of the Civil Rights Movement
A week later, at Emmett’s funeral in Chicago, his mother Mamie Till-Mobley insists the casket be left open so everyone can see her son’s face, distorted from the beatings. The photos of Emmett’s body go around the country and cause great emotion, but the same day, Roy Bryant and his half-brother are acquitted by a grand jury in Mississippi.
The verdict caused an outcry and the Emmett Till case became one of the factors behind the civil rights movement, and Mamie Till-Mobley became an active activist. A few months later, Roy Bryant and his half-brother admitted to being Emmett’s murderers in Look Magazine, assured of not being worried by justice. After the investigation was reopened in 2004, Carolyn Bryant confessed in 2017 to having lied by accusing Emmett of having grabbed her by the waist and made advances.