HUNT VALLEY, Md. (TND) — Tuesday would have been Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday.
In honor of his life, which ended in 1955 in a killing that helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement, President Joe Biden established a national monument honoring Till and his late mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who allowed an open-casket funeral so the world could see her 14-year-old son’s mutilated body.
In his remarks, Biden said he had to temper his anger.
“To see the child that had been maimed, the country and the world saw the story of Emmett Till and his mother as a story of a family’s promise and loss, and a nation’s reckoning with hate, violence, racism, overwhelming abuse of power, brutality,” Biden said. “It’s hard to fathom. It’s hard to fathom it’s even a war for me. It’s hard to fathom.”
Till was beaten, shot and dumped in a river four days after a 21-year-old white woman accused him of whistling at her. His killers – two white men – went on trial in a segregated courthouse in Mississippi. The all-white jury deliberated for less than an hour before acquitting the men.
In 2017, the author of the book The Blood of Emmett Till, revealed that the woman who accused Till of flirting with her, Carolyn Bryant, admitted Till never touched, threatened or harassed her. She said nothing Till did “could ever justify what happened to him.”
Just last year, a grand jury in Mississippi declined to indict her in relation to the crime. She died earlier this year.
The new Till monument will span two states. One of the monument sites will be at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Till’s open-casket funeral took place. The other two are in Mississippi: one at Graball Landing, where Till’s body was believed to be pulled from the Tallahatchie River, and the other at the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, where Till’s killers were acquitted.
In March 2022, Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law, making lynching a federal hate crime.
This new designation marks a fresh effort by Biden to make the country face its bloody racial history – as debates over Black history ramp up among some Republicans with eyes on the White House.
“At a time when there are those who seek to ban books, bury history, we’re making it clear, crystal, crystal clear,” Biden said. “While darkness and denialism can hide much, they erase nothing. We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know. We have to learn what we should know.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – who’s running for the GOP nomination for president next year – is fending off criticism, and potential lawsuits, over new Black history standards his state’s Education Department just approved.
The standards require instruction on how “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” and how Black Americans were violent themselves during race massacres.
DeSantis has deflected criticism, saying he “wasn’t involved in it” and “it was not anything that was done politically.”
“They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis told reporters Friday.
Still, Democrats and civil rights groups are threatening to boycott and sue the state, accusing the 2024 White House hopeful of trying to rewrite Black history.
Biden alluded to Desantis in his remarks.
“Telling the truth and the full history of our nation is important,” Biden said. “It’s important to our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren, our nation as a whole.
“Hate never goes away. It just hides, it hides under the rocks. Given a little bit of oxygen, like bad people, it comes roaring out again. It's up to all of us to deal with that, up to all of us to stop it. The best way to do that is with the truth.”
As Biden campaigns for re-election in 2024, he touts various moves he’s made to support Black America, including declaring Juneteenth a national holiday, nominating the first Black woman to the Supreme Court bench, pardoning everyone convicted of marijuana possession under federal law and signing legislation to address the racial wealth gap.
Some analysts assert Black voters put Biden in office – voting 92%-8% for Biden over Trump in 2020, according to Pew Research data. Nearly two in ten voters who cast a ballot for Biden in 2020 were Black.
In his third year in office, polling showed Black Americans are still the core support of the Biden administration, with 66% approving of the job he’s done, according to a May Ipsos-Washington Post survey.
But, just slightly over a third believe his policies have helped their demographic.
“It’s a paradox,” said Emmanuel Oritsejafor, who chairs the Department of Political Science at North Carolina Central University. “While 60-something percent are saying, ‘Hurrah! Yeah, that’s the way to go,’ it doesn’t really reflect the outcomes for people of minority groups. When you look at the State of Black America, you’ll see a lot has not fundamentally changed since the 2022 report.”
The 2022 report, conducted by the National Urban League, found Black people still get only 73.9% of the American share of wealth white people have. The median household income for Black people is 37% less than that of white people.
As part of Biden’s effort to take on the racial wealth gap, he announced the creation of an initiative to address inequity in home appraisals, new rules that reverse efforts under the Trump administration to weaken protections under the Fair Housing Act, and a goal of increasing the share of federal contracts awarded to small, disadvantaged businesses by 50% over the next five years.
He also said his “Bidenomics” plan, which “grows the economy from the middle out and the bottom up” is working for Black America – citing the lowest Black unemployment rate on record, the highest Black employment rate since November 2000, increased Black enrollment in HealthCare.gov coverage by 49% from 2020 to 2022 and reducing the Black child poverty rate by greater than 12%.
Still, Oritsejafor said Black America is “not likely to have done better in recent years,” and the “picture is bleak.” He blamed the overarching issue of inflation disproportionately impacting minority groups, along with the pandemic.
“At the end of the day, the minorities are the ones who are disproportionately being impacted by the negative outcomes of what we’ve seen globally,” he said. “Biden put in policies to address some of these inequalities, so that hasn’t been a bad initiative, but the short end of the stick has been held by the poor people and minorities in general.”
Oritsejafor pointed out some of Biden’s agenda has hit roadblocks at the Supreme Court and in the divided halls of Congress, particularly when it came to student loan forgiveness, affirmative action, voting rights and police reform.
Heading into 2024, the professor said these will be the important issues to address. Oritsejafor said he believes police reform needs to be clarified and better articulated, and the administration should still try and tackle how to increase access to higher education for Black students.
Overall, the professor said he thinks the Black voting bloc is still in support of Biden’s direction, and as inflation starts to finally decrease, voters will have faith in four more years of him.
“We may see some new momentum from voters, and those who have sat at home are likely to come out, because there’s more opportunities and more at stake for them to come out and vote,” he said. “But they’re also wondering, why should we be going out to vote if there’s no real outcome?”
