A bill to posthumously award the Congressional Gold Medal to Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, is headed to President Joe Biden’s desk after the U.S. House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 450 on Dec. 21, 2022. The Congressional Gold Medal is the highest civilian award the body gives.
On Aug. 28, 1955, a group of white men in Money, Miss., brutally murdered Till, a 14-year-old Black boy, for allegedly whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. His mother, who later died in 2013 at age 81, insisted on an open-casket burial at the time and became an activist and leading voice against race violence in America.
“The people of the United States honor the legacy of Emmett Till and the incredible suffering and equally incredible courage, resilience, and efforts of Mamie Till-Mobley that led to the civil rights movement that began in the 1950s,” Senate Bill 450 says.
President Joe Biden had, in March 2022, signed the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act making lynching a federal hate crime. Members of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation in collaboration with filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, on June 21, 2022, discovered a 1955 warrant for Carolyn Bryant’s arrest over her alleged involvement with Till’s kidnapping. A Leflore County grand jury, however, declined to indict the 88-year-old, whose name is now Carolyn Bryant Donham, in August. Beauchamp, who is on the advisory board of the Mississippi Free Press, joined others to release a film in October titled “Till,” on the mother’s advocacy for never-served justice for her son.
‘The Challenge We Still Face’
The Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley Institute Board President Christopher Benson, in a press release on Thursday, described the impact of Till’s lynching on the “modern civil rights” movement and hailed the boy’s mother’s “determination in confronting racial violence and the political system that enabled it.”
“We see this award as recognition that her story is a part of our shared American history and the challenge we still face in this contemporary moment,” he said.
The Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley Institute Board President Christopher Benson said the posthumous Congressional Gold Medal Award to Emmett Till