Congress to bestow medal to Emmett Till and his mother
Source: ABC News
WASHINGTON -- The House unanimously passed a bill Wednesday to posthumously award the Congressional Gold Medal to Emmett Till, the Chicago teenager murdered by white supremacists in the 1950s, and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. The bill, which passed the Senate in January, is meant to honor Till and his mother — who had insisted on an open casket funeral to demonstrate the brutality of his killing — with the highest civilian honor that Congress awards.
The medal will be given to the National Museum of African American History where it will be displayed near the casket Till was buried in. Till was abducted, tortured and killed in 1955 after witnesses said he whistled at a white woman at a grocery store in rural Mississippi, a violation of the South’s racist societal codes at the time. In return, he was rousted from bed and abducted from a great-uncle’s home in the predawn hours four days later.
The killing galvanized the civil rights movement after Till’s mother insisted on an open casket and Jet magazine published photos of his brutalized body. The Senate bill was introduced by Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J. and Richard Burr, R-N.C.. The House version of the legislation is sponsored by Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., who also sponsored a bill to issue a commemorative postage stamp in honor of Mamie Till-Mobley. She died in 2003.
“The courage and activism demonstrated by Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, in displaying to the world the brutality endured by her son helped awaken the nation’s conscience, forcing America to reckon with its failure to address racism and the glaring injustices that stem from such hatred,” Booker said in a statement after the bill passed the Senate.
Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/congress-bestow-medal-emmett-till-mother-95669520
Congrats and long long long overdue as one of the main catalysts of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Thank you for this post.....
A friend and I saw the recent movie, Till, on demand. We kept trying to go to a theatre but the times were either too early or too late for our schedules..
I thought the movie was excellent. It's main focus was what Mamie did and the impact it had on the country.
So I guess they didn't have the guts to vote for OR against it? What a pack of 🐔💩 LOOZERS!
Not enough eye rolls in the world for this, but here are a few anyway:
and what that does is force the bill to go through "regular order" with a debate and options for amendments, etc. (if the Rules Committee sets it up that way) and then a standard vote.
Guarantee that if they had won both the House and Senate, they would have attempted to give one of these to 45 in a hot minute.
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"On Thursday, the center announced on Twitter that the historical marker in front of the site of the former Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in Money, Miss. — where Emmett went to buy candy and was later accused of flirting with the white shopkeeper, eventually leading to his lynching by two white men — was gone.
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"But the Emmett Till Interpretive Center is reluctant to write off the incident as an accident, given the history of vandalism of signs memorializing the boy’s death.
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"'There’s a lot of red flags when the sign goes missing,' Patrick Weems, co-founder of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, said in an interview."
More at link.
