Find out what's happening in South Sidewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

“I can’t fathom what it would be like,” the president said. “It’s hard to believe. I was 12 years old, and I know no matter how much time has passed, how many birthdays, events and anniversaries, it’s hard to relive this. It’s as if it happened yesterday.”

Till’s mother and other relatives had reservations about allowing the happy-go-lucky jokester, Bobo, the nickname given to him by his family, to go to Mississippi, where the only way for a Black person to survive the Jim Crow south during the 1950s was to “abide by its mores and stay out of harm’s way.”

“Nobody in the family felt that Emmett was capable of doing that. He was too much of a jokester, fun-loving and free spirited,” Parker told Patch in a 2015 interview. “They didn’t want Emmett to go. He shouldn’t have ever gone because what did happen is what they thought could happen. They knew he didn’t fit in with the south. It’s mind-boggling to think that all of these things went on and nobody of any importance said anything.”

Four days before his abduction, Till along with seven or eight cousins, went to the country store after a long, hot day of picking cotton to buy candy and pop. Bobo — Parker still finds it strange to refer to his cousin by his given name — and another cousin had purchased their items. The white store owner, Carolyn Bryant, came outside where the teens were still hanging out. Till wolf-whistled at her to make his cousins laugh. It was only by his cousins’ terrified reactions that the teen realized he had seriously erred.

The violated taboo would not go unanswered. Four days later, in the middle of the night, half-brothers Roy Bryant and J.B. Milam walked unimpeded into the home of Mose Wright, Parker’s grandfather and Till’s great uncle. Passing through Parker’s bedroom, they roused Bobo up from his bed and took him into the night.

Three days later, Till’s body, beaten and mutilated beyond recognition, surfaced from the Tallahatchie River by Graball Landing. A cotton gin fan had been tied around the teen’s neck with barbed wire in an attempt to weigh it down in the water.

Graball Landing in Glendora, Miss. | AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis

Authorities tried to prevent the teen’s body from being shipped back home to Chicago. In fact, a funeral service was already taking place and a grave was dug at a local cemetery in Money, when Mamie demanded that her son’s body be returned to Chicago. The teen’s body was allowed to be shipped home.

Defying orders from a Mississippi funeral home to keep her son’s casket sealed, Mamie Till-Mobley decided to hold an open-casket funeral “for the world to see what they did to my boy.” Thousands filed past Till’s open casket at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago’s historically Black Bronzeville neighborhood. Photos of the teen’s mutilated corpse published in Jet magazine would spark the Civil Rights movement.

“All of us who lost children in other ways know how hard it is to close the casket or keep it open, and what a debate it is,” Biden said. “To see the child who had been maimed. The country and the world saw the nation’s reckoning with violence and racism, and the abuse of power and brutality. It’s hard to fathom.”

In addition to praising the bravery and activism of Mamie Till-Mobley, Biden also praised the Black press — Jet, the Chicago Defender and the radio announcers who got the story of Till’s lynching out to the mainstream news media, shocking white America.

“At a time when those seek to ban books and bury history, we’re making it crystal clear, darkness and nihilism can hide much, but they erase nothing,” Biden said. “We just can’t choose to learn what we want to know. We should know about our country. We should know everything. The good, the bad, the truth, because that’s what great nations do and we are a great nation… It’s another step forward to forming a more perfect union. We got a hell of a long way to go.”

Emmett Till was one of three lynching victims in the Mississippi Delta during the summer of 1955, and one of thousands of Black people lynched in the 100 years following the Civil War. According to the proclamation signed Tuesday by Biden:

“Conserving the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ [in Chicago], the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, and Graball Landing [in Mississippi] will ensure that the historical value of these sites will remain for the benefit of all Americans, providing opportunities to learn about Emmett Till’s life and death and the historical and cultural context interwoven with his story.”

The federally designated sites will be maintained and protected by the National Park Service. Altogether, the Till national monument will include 5.7 acres of land and two historic buildings. The Mississippi sites are Graball Landing and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, where Emmett’s killers were tried. Milam and Bryant would later admit to their roles in Till’s murder to a Look magazine reporter. As if in an attempt to erase history, on Monday, the historical marker by Graball Landing, marking the spot where Till’s body was found, was pulled out of the Tallahatchie River.

Parker, now a minister in Summit, Ill., has spent his life journeying from “the darkness of a thousand midnights in a pitch black house” 67 years ago to the light.

“I tell kids I can’t afford the luxury of hate,” said Parker in 2015. “Hate destroys the hater. I refuse to hate, and that’s the way we have to go through life.”

Learn more about the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley story in Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr.’s eyewitness account A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice For My Cousin and Best Friend, Emmett Till (with Christopher Denton).

Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

Click Here: custom injection moulding