Free Republic

President Joe Biden will establish a national monument to honour Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched in 1955 in Mississippi, as well as his mother, a White House official said. Till's lynching and the activism of his mother Mamie Till-Mobley helped galvanise the civil rights movement. Mr Biden will sign a proclamation on Tuesday which is Till's birthday, 25 July. It comes a year after he signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act into law. The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument will include three separate sites in two states - Illinois and Mississippi. One site is the...

Emmett Till protesters stormed a senior living facility in search of the woman who has been accused of setting a lynch mob on him after a 1955 arrest warrant was unearthed in a Mississippi courthouse. Carolyn Bryant Donham, now in her 80s, of Raleigh, North Carolina, reportedly accused Till of whistling at her in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. A week later, the 14-year-old Till was abducted, tortured, fatally shot and dumped into the Tallahatchie River, where his body was found swollen and mutilated three days later. His open casket shocked the nation. Donham's husband, Roy Bryant,...

AP — JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — A team searching a Mississippi courthouse basement for evidence about the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till has found the unserved warrant charging a white woman in his 1955 kidnapping, and relatives of the victim want authorities to finally arrest her nearly 70 years later. A warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham — identified as “Mrs. Roy Bryant” on the document — was discovered last week by searchers inside a file folder that had been placed in a box, Leflore County Circuit Clerk Elmus Stockstill told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Documents...

Actress Taraji P. Henson compared Jussie Smollett’s fake hate crime sentence to the lynching of Emmett Till in a celebrity-endorsed plea for early release. Henson, who co-starred with Smollett on the Fox show “Empire,” took to Instagram in a display of hashtag activism to make her case. Rather than argue on the merits of innocence or guilt, Henson claims Smollett is facing excessive punishment. “I am not here to debate you on his innocence,” Henson wrote, “but we can agree that the punishment does not fit the crime.” 0:10 / 50:16 1 seconds... Henson then proceeded to compare the sentence...

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Interior Secretary Deb Haaland toured Mississippi civil rights sites Tuesday, seeing the crumbling rural store that’s part of the history of the 1955 lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till and touring the home where state NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963. Haaland traveled with White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory and Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson. The sites are in Thompson’s district, which encompasses the Delta flatlands and much of Mississippi’s capital city of Jackson. Haaland said she heard from young people who did not learn about Till while they were...

ATLANTA — The Justice Department announced on Monday that it had closed an investigation into the abduction and murder of Emmett Till, the African American teenager whose gruesome killing by two white men more than six decades ago in Mississippi helped begin the civil rights movement. In a news release dated Dec. 6, federal officials said there was not enough evidence to pursue charges in the case, which was reopened after a historian claimed in a book that Carolyn Bryant Donham, the central witness whose account of an encounter with Emmett led to his death, had recanted the most salacious...

Fed up with white people calling 911 about people of color selling water bottles, barbecuing or otherwise going about their lives, San Francisco leaders unanimously approved hate crime legislation giving the targets of those calls the ability to sue the caller. The Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday on the Caution Against Racial and Exploitative Non-Emergencies Act, also known as the CAREN legislation. It’s a nod to a popular meme using the name “Karen” to describe an entitled white woman whose actions stem from her privilege, such as using police to target people of color. All 11 supervisors signed on to...

A group of people carrying a white nationalist flag were caught on camera Saturday attempting to record a video in front of the Emmett Till memorial in Sumner, Mississippi. Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission, told NBC News that the group was captured on camera by a new surveillance system that was updated when the bulletproof memorial was dedicated on Oct. 19. "This is the first incident we’ve seen of what appears to be white nationalists making a propaganda video," Weems said. One man can be heard in the video identifying the sign as a monument...

A new bulletproof memorial to Emmett Till was unveiled Saturday after the previous sign was repeatedly damaged. The new sign, made out of bulletproof steel and ten times heavier than the previous one was memorialized Saturday as members of Till’s family gathered at Graball Landing in Mississippi. Graball Landing is the site where the 14-year-old’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River after he was murdered in 1955. The sign will also be behind a gate and under the watch of surveillance cameras, according to the memorial’s commission. Ja’han Jones, a reporter at HuffPost, shared a photo of the new...

On Wednesday, the New York Times published a long article about the murder of Emmett Till. This tweet sums it up: In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till walked into a Mississippi store to buy candy. After being accused of whistling at the white woman behind the counter, he was kidnapped, lynched and dumped into a river. https://nyti.ms/2E17f4P What made the Till story timely this week? Could there be a connection between the Jussie Smollett fiasco and the Times’s interest in the 64-year-old Till case? Steve Sailer actually predicted the Times story on Till a week ago: As I predicted in a...

In the wake of Bill Cosby‘s conviction on three counts of sexual assault last month, his wife, Camille Cosby, has issued a lengthy statement defending her husband. In the nearly 800-word statement, she compares Bill Cosby’s accusers to Emmett Till‘s accuser, chastises the media, and calls the district attorney office’s campaign “unethical.” Camille Cosby’s statement: “We the people” are the first three words of our nation’s Constitution, but who were those people in 1787? Dr. Howard Zinn, the renowned, honest historian, states in his best selling book, A People’s History of the United States: “The majority of the 55 men...

The federal government has reopened its investigation into the slaying of Emmett Till, the black teenager whose brutal 1955 killing in Mississippi shocked the world. A Justice Department report to Congress says the agency is reinvestigating Till's slaying after receiving what it calls "new information." Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, was kidnapped from his uncle's home in the town of Money and killed after he wolf-whistled at Carolyn Donham, a shopkeeper. Three days later, his mutilated body was found in the muddy Tallahatchie River, weighted down with a cotton gin fan. His left eye was missing, and his right...

Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago died a horrific death at the hands of two white men after buying bubble gum while visiting racially segregated Mississippi in 1955. They beat, shot and disfigured his body beyond recognition - and walked free, acquitted at the hands of an all-white, all-male jury. Emmett's crime was allegedly whistling at a white woman. The woman, Carolyn Bryant, has lived in relative hiding for the last five decades, haunted by her past. She has now admitted that her testimony, which carried the case, was a blatant lie. A new book, The Blood of...

Despite progress over the last century, for black people this country has failed to ever make good on its earliest and most basic democratic protection: the 14th Amendment. When the 14th Amendment was enacted, it was meant to provide equal protection to all under the law. But if a black person can be gunned down and left in the street for over four hours with no disciplinary action taken against the government representative responsible, what does "equal protection" mean? Redeeming the promise of the 14th Amendment is as relevant today as it was when first enacted. On August 9, 2014,...

The Harvard Law professor who mentored President Obama and the first lady during their time in Cambridge has compared the Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Speaking with MSNBC’s Alex Wagner, Charles Ogletree also compared the police shooting of 18-year-old Brown to the 1955 killing of Emmett Till. “Looking at what’s happened, this is just like the assassination of Dr. King in 1968, when everybody was very upset trying to figure out what was going to happen,” he said. “It’s like the killing of Trayvon Martin two years ago. “This is...

Tracy Martin wants his son, Trayvon, to be remembered as this century's Emmett Till, and have his death reawaken the nation's lagging civil rights movement. "We want him to be known as that child of central Florida who galvanized the country," said Martin, who was a guest speaker at Nassau Community College on Wednesday. "We would like to see his name in the history books of modern days, taking his place beside Emmett Till [though] Emmett Till has a legacy I don't think any African-American child will surpass." Till, 14, was killed in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of...

Oprah Winfrey on Monday said the killings of Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till are the "same thing." OPRAH WINFREY: "It's so easy during this time: Trayvon Martin, Trayvon Martin parallel to Emmett Till, let me just tell you. In my mind, same thing. But you can, you can get stuck in that and not allow yourself to move forward and to see how far we've come." Really? Martin and Till are the same thing? As race baiters in the media have been dishonestly making this claim since the George Zimmerman verdict was announced, let's take a look at what happened...

No presidency is complete without a constitutional crisis, real or imagined. Political critics claimed George W. Bush committed a string of high crimes and misdemeanors, from the Iraq war, to torture, to illegal wiretaps. Bill Clinton’s impeachment was not over his horn dogging, but his mendacities regarding said activities. Ronald Reagan traded arms for hostages. Richard Nixon resigned over his involvement in the Watergate cover up when he forgot the president is not above the law. And, really, doesn’t every constitutional crisis start with a president believing the Constitution is a list of suggestions best left for others to follow?...

Supporters of the protests that followed the suspicious death of Trayvon Martin are raising a good question: What next? Many have compared the shooting of the 17-year-old to the brutal 1955 murder of Emmett Till, the black Chicago teen who was murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The comparison is far from perfect. George Zimmerman, 28, the volunteer neighborhood watchman charged with second-degree murder in the shooting of the unarmed youth, claims self-defense. Till's murderers were enforcing the old South's willfully racist political and social system. But as markers of their very different eras, the two...

The casket that held the mutilated body of civil rights martyr Emmett Till for 50 years will go on public display in the nation's newest African-American history museum, officials said. The move comes a month after the casket was found discarded at Burr Oak Cemetery near Alsip. Officials with the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture are expected to announce the casket's donation just before a memorial ceremony Friday to commemorate 54 years since Till's murder. Members of Till's family and museum officials -- including its director, Lonnie Bunch III -- are expected to attend the...