Security ramps up at civil-rights sites
Memorials become vandalism targets
A commission behind a memorial for teenage lynching victim Emmett Till in Mississippi was forced to get a new sign with a bullet-resistant glass front, as well as add cameras and alarms after previous markers were riddled with bullet holes.
It’s one of numerous monuments to U.S. civil-rights figures or events around the country that have been attacked by vandals through the years, forcing organizations and elected officials to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair or replace the monuments and equip them with surveillance.
There’s no movement to pass federal protections for such memorials, and advocates of the sites say their only recourse has been to rely on local and state vandalism and hate crime laws to prosecute suspects.
“It happens so much that I can’t get angry because I’m not surprised,” said Maria Varela, a Mississippi civil-rights organizer and photographer with a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. “But this tells me the people who are doing this are still so scared.”
The need for protection for such memorials came into focus again this month after security cameras captured white nationalists trying to film in front of the new sign that describes how the body of Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago, was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. A man in the security video said the memorial represents the civil-rights movement for black people. He then asks, “Where are all the white people?” One person carried a white flag with a large cross, a symbol associated with the League of the South — a neo-Confederate group. After a security alarm went off, the group ran away without doing any damage.
The cameras and alarms are part of an updated security system that accompanies the 500-pound steel sign after three previous markers were vandalized, including two that were left riddled with bullet holes.
“Without a doubt, those cameras have helped deter potential vandalism,” said Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission.
Till was visiting family members in Money, Miss., in August 1955 when a white woman at a store falsely accused him of whistling at her.
The woman’s husband and another man were charged with kidnapping, beating and fatally shooting the teen. An all-white jury acquitted the men.
The killing and photos of Till’s mutilated body at his funeral shocked the nation and galvanized the civil-rights movement.
Weems said memorial preservation and fundraising should be done with potential vandalism in mind. The new, donated sign cost around $10,000, he said. Plus, the commission has paid $1,000 for security cameras, and an estimated $250,000 is being spent on a smartphone app that will allow people to navigate sites related to Till’s killing and to report vandalism, he said.
At other memorials, updated security measures have helped authorities locate suspects.
In September, a 65-yearold woman was arrested after, police said, she defaced a memorial in Glendale, Calif., dedicated to Korean women forced into sex slavery during World War II. Police said surveillance footage showed her using a marker to scribble on the monument. She’s suspected of defacing the monument several times before and of writing racially charged graffiti on area buildings.
“The defacement opened up the wounds of the victims as if to say your pain doesn’t matter,” Phyllis Kim of the Korean American Forum of California said. “But the community came together and denounced it.”
Derek Alderman, a University of Tennessee geography professor, said such vandalism is “an attack on memory.”
“These places are more than just monuments and memorials. They are claims to the past,” Alderman said.
Jeremy Yamin, associate vice president for the Boston-based Combined Jewish Philanthropies, which maintains surveillance of the New England Holocaust Memorial, said such attacks appear to be on the rise.
After 20 years with no vandalism, the Holocaust Memorial was hit twice in 2017, he said. His group spent $70,000 on repairs and $75,000 on security cameras.
Yamin said the group is preparing to put up a sign that says: This memorial is monitored.
“We hope that will be a deterrent,” he said.