The Senate has passed a bill to grant the Congressional Gold Medal in retrospect to Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black teenager from Chicago who was murdered by white supremacists in 1955, and his mother Mamie Til-Mobley who insisted on having an open-casket funeral to reveal the brutality of his killing.
Emmett Till was abducted, severely beaten, and killed after white witnesses said that he whistled at a white woman at a grocery store in Mississippi, which at the time was a violation of the South’s racist societal codes. Till was then taken from his great-uncle’s home in the early morning hours four days later and was beaten to death. After Till’s mother insisted on an open casket, Jet magazine publiRichard Burr, R-N-C., and Senator Cory Booker, D-N-J., first introduced the bill in 2020 to honor Emmett and his mother with the highest civilian honor that Congress awards. The legislation described this as long-overdue recognition of what the Till family endured and what they accompli
