History lessons
Civil rights landmarks are in line to become national monuments
WASHINGTON – Every year, Deborah Watts and other relatives of Emmett Till make a 30-mile pilgrimage through the heart of Mississippi, tracing the path of the 14year-old who was murdered there more than 60 years ago.
One stop is the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, where two men accused of killing Till in 1955 were acquitted.
“It’s a painful part of our past,” said Watts, co-founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation. “We do it for the purpose of remembering, never forgetting and educating ourselves and others on what really happened.”
Educating the nation about Till’s death, which became a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, could soon become an expanded mission for the National Park Service.
The park service is considering whether to designate the courthouse and other civil rights sites in Mississippi as national monuments and include them in the federal park system.
The effort to highlight key sites in Till’s life and death is part of a broader push by congressional lawmakers and others to highlight the importance of civil rights landmarks in the nation’s history.
“We can’t speak about civil rights unless we speak about Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley,” Watts said. “It was the catalyst for starting the civil rights movement.
… We’ve got to tell the truth about what happened.”
Mobley had an open-casket funeral for her son in Chicago to show the world how Till, who had been visiting family in Mississippi, had been brutally beaten and shot in the head. Witnesses said two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, kidnapped Till, whose body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River.
Democratic Reps. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and Terri Sewell of Alabama are pushing for significant but sometimes little-recognized civil rights sites — including courthouses, homes, jails and even bus stops — to be included in the national park system.
If successful, the change would bring more national attention and greater preservation protections to these landmarks. Most of the locations are in the Deep South, which was ground zero of the civil rights movement.
“There’s a general interest around making sure that history reflects accurately what went on,” said Thompson, whose district is home to several key civil rights sites. “Very few people dispute the fact that African-American and the civil rights history in the South specifically has gone unaccounted for in many instances.”
There have been other recent efforts to recognize the turbulent history of African Americans, particularly in the South. Just last month, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a lynching memorial, opened in Alabama. Earlier this year, civil rights activists celebrated the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016 in the nation’s capital,
“This part of our history, for me, is personal because so much of who I am was on the back and lives of these people. There’s history there. We can’t ever let it be forgotten.”
Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.
has an entire floor dedicated to the civil rights movement.
Thompson said there is “no better custodian” than the National Park Service to help restore and maintain civil rights sites.
“We’ve been working with them for quite some time while trying to get a real focus on that part of Mississippi’s history that not only needs to be told, but needs to accurately reflect what really happened,” Thompson said.
Among the sites under consideration by the park service are the home of Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the Mississippi NAACP who was shot in his driveway in June 1963, and the Old Neshoba County Jail in Philadelphia, where three civil rights workers — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — were held before being murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan in June 1964.
Congress passed a bill last year to study the historical significance of civil rights sites in Mississippi and whether they should be under the park service.
Before leaving office in 2017, President Obama designated two sites in Alabama national monuments, the Freedom Riders National Monument in Anniston and the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument.
Last December, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended several sites for national monuments, including the Evers’ home in Mississippi. Separately, a House subcommittee recently approved legislation proposed by Thompson and Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, that would formalize that designation, but Republican leaders have not yet brought it to the floor.
“This part of our history, for me, is personal because so much of who I am was on the backs and lives of people” who fought and died for civil rights, Thompson said.
“There’s history there. We can’t ever let it be forgotten.”