CHICAGO (CN) — The church where Emmett Till's funeral took place was formally deemed a national monument Tuesday in a ceremony featuring multiple Illinois officials and prominent figures in Black Chicago politics.
Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ on the South Side of Chicago was the site of murdered Black teen Till's open-casket funeral in 1955, an event which has been credited with helping to launch the broader civil rights movement.
President Joe Biden last week declared the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, which includes the Pentecostal church in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood as well as two other sites in Mississippi.
Speakers at Tuesday's event included Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Democratic senators Dick Durban and Tammy Duckworth, retired Democratic Illinois congressman and former Black Panther Bobby Rush, and Illinois congressman Johnathan Jackson — son of the esteemed civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson — among others.
"We are on hallowed ground," Rush told press, local community members and Till's surviving relatives gathered in the hot church on Tuesday. "Here is the birthplace of the civil rights movement," he later added.
Despite its designation as a national landmark, no federal funds have yet been approved to renovate or maintain the decades-old building. The National Park Service has an easement for deeded access to the church, but only directly owns a portion of its parking lot. A representative for the National Parks Service said the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private non-profit based in Washington, is currently in talks with the church over renovation plans, but declined to comment further.
Two white men, suspected to be locals Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, murdered Till near Money, Mississippi, in August of 1955. The pair kidnapped, lynched and shot the then-14-year-old Black Chicago native while he was visiting relatives over the summer, allegedly as punishment for Till flirting with Bryant's 21-year-old wife Carolyn in the couple's convenience store.
Though Bryant and Milam were charged with Till's murder, an all-white, all-male jury acquitted both men. Carolyn Bryant never faced any legal consequences for her part in the Black teen's murder. She died last April at the age of 88.
Till, had he lived, would have turned 82 year old on July 25.
The young teenager's funeral at Roberts Temple Church proved a seminal event in the history of Black Chicago and the civil rights movement, due in large part to his mother Mamie Till-Mobley's decision to leave his casket open. Till's body, once returned to Chicago, was visibly bloated and disfigured. His skull was crushed, his right eye dislodged, his wrists broken.
"Let the people see what they did to my boy," Till-Mobley reportedly said.
It is estimated that more than 100,000 people, most of them Black, attended the funeral over Labor Day weekend.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, in his comments at Tuesday's ceremony, credited Black Chicago news outlets like The Chicago Defender for popularizing Till's story.
According to Bronzeville Historical Society founder Sherry Williams, the simple act of so many Black people gathering in one place for common cause was enough to scare the white authorities of the day.
"There was always suspicion around Blacks gathering in groups of more than two people," Williams said. "[The funeral] would be controversial globally."
Pritzker, in his own prepared remarks, connected the 1955 funeral with the 1963 March on Washington, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. The latter makes lynching punishable as a hate crime and became federal law only last year.
"A direct line can be drawn from each of those moments to Mamie Till-Mobley's courageous activism in her beloved son's memory," Pritzker said.
Rush himself led the crowd in chanting, "Thank you, Mama Mamie," and lauded what he called "the power of the open casket."
The speakers, all Democrats, also used the opportunity to boost President Biden, whose approval rating among Black voters has been slipping since he took office and who plans to run for reelection in 2024. They also took jabs at Republican figures like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a 2024 presidential candidate, who recently defended Florida's revised school curriculum, which teaches students that "slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."
Senator Duckworth called on the crowd to be "soldiers" in the fight against DeSantis and other far-right Republicans and thanked the Biden administration for proclaiming the church's landmark status.
"The same people who are running for president and saying enslaved people benefitted from being enslaved ... those same people are also motivated, yes by hate, but by fear," Duckworth said. "Because they truly are cowards."
Despite the Democrats' spirited rhetoric at least one community member in attendance, Vickki Willis, voiced frustration that abuse and systemic injustice against Black Americans still lingers even in deep blue Chicago. Willis' 27-year-old son Alteriq Pleasant died in Cook County Jail last August, and Willis says she still doesn't know what exactly happened to her son and that authorities have ignored her requests for information.
Between 1995 and 2021 more than 230 people died in custody in Cook County, many of them Black men. Last week, two brothers filed suit against Chicago and former members of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office for the more than 25 years each they spent behind bars, after police allegedly beat false confessions out of them.
Connecting her son's experience to Till's, Willis urged local officials to do more to protect Black people from a legal system still seeped in racism.
"It's not just [Alteriq]," Willis said. "It's all the other souls who have died behind the bars of Cook County."
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