SUMNER – On Tuesday, Feb. 15, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory, at the invitation of Congressman Bennie Thompson, visited sites across the Mississippi Delta associated with Emmett Till’s life and murder to gather local input on the creation of a national park dedicated to Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley.
Sites visited included the Tallahatchie County Courthouse and Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center in Glendora, the Tutwiler Funeral Home in Tutwiler and Mound Bayou. At each site, Haaland and Mallory met with and listened to local residents.
In 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black child from Chicago, took the train down to the Mississippi Delta to visit family. On Aug. 24, 1955, he whistled at a white woman in a grocery store. Three days later, he was abducted from his great-uncle Moses Wright’s home and brutally beaten and murdered by a group of white men. His murder made international news, and over 100,000 people paid their respects to Till's body at his funeral at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago.
The trial at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant for Till's murder was described by journalist David Halberstam as “the first great media event of the civil rights movement.” During the trial, Moses Wright stood to identify the murderers in court, one of the first times a Black person had accused a white person of murder in a Southern courtroom. The trial was courageously attended by Mamie Till-Mobley, Medgar Evers, Congressman Charles Diggs, and Dr. T.R.M. Howard. The jury of 12 white men found Milam and Bryant not guilty after deliberating for only 67 minutes. Several months later, they confessed to the murder and sold their story to a magazine.
Over the last 15 years, the Tallahatchie County Board of Supervisors and the Emmett Till Memorial Commission partnered to restore the Sumner courthouse to its 1955 condition during the murder trial to act as a site of conscience. In 2007, the courthouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places as the site of the Milam/Bryant murder trial. The restoration of the building was completed in December 2020.
The National Park Service invited members of the Till family to travel with them to visit these sites Tuesday, including Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., Emmett Till’s cousin and the last living eyewitness to his kidnapping.
“We want to thank Secretary Haaland, Chair Mallory and Congressman Thompson for their trip to the Mississippi Delta to meet with the Till family to discuss the importance of the creation of a National Park that honors Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, and that helps us to preserve their legacy,” said Parker.
“Our community has been working for the past fifteen years to tell the truth about what happened to Emmett Till and to work towards racial healing,” said Rev. Willie Williams, chairman of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission. “We appreciate Secretary Haaland, Rep. Thompson and Chair Mallory taking time to visit these sites across the Delta to see where this important American story took place. I think it was made clear today by a cross section of our community that there is a need to save these places and to add them to the National Park Service system.”
“This visit by the secretary of the Interior and the congressman is the culmination of years of hard work and leadership by the Board of Supervisors of Tallahatchie County,” said Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission.
The Emmett Till Interpretive Center, in partnership with the Till family, launched an Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Park Campaign in March 2021 to support the creation of a national park with multiple sites across the Mississippi Delta and Chicago. To learn more about the national park campaign, visit TillNationalPark.org.
