Congress Honors Emmett Till and His Mother With Gold Medal Vote

Nearly seven decades after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy, was abducted and killed by white men in Mississippi, Congress has approved a bill that would posthumously award him and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, with its highest civilian honor.

The bill, which would honor Emmett and Ms. Till-Mobley with the Congressional Gold Medal, was passed by voice vote in the House on Wednesday, nearly a year after its unanimous approval in the Senate in January. If the measure is signed into law by President Biden, the medal will be presented to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., where the coffin in which Emmett was originally buried is on display.

Representative Bobby L. Rush, the Illinois Democrat who introduced the bill in the House last year, said that the award was a way to “honor Emmett’s life and his mother Mamie’s contributions to racial justice.”

“The gruesome and unjust murder of Emmett Till serves as one of the most well-known examples of a lynching in American history,” Mr. Rush said in a statement. “Without the courage and determination of his mother, Mamie, in keeping his casket open during his funeral, the world would not know what happened to him or the full horrors of white supremacy.”

In August 1955, while visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta, Emmett went to a store and bought bubble gum from a white woman named Carolyn Bryant. A cousin and another Black teenager who was with him later said that when Emmett paid, he had placed the money in her hand instead of leaving it on the counter, as white Mississippians expected African Americans to do at the time. Four days later, having been accused of whistling at Ms. Bryant, Emmett was kidnapped, tortured and lynched by at least two men: Ms. Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother J.W. Milam.

Emmett’s mutilated body — shattered wrists, a crushed skull, a disfigured face with one eye gouged out — was discarded in the Tallahatchie River.

When his remains were eventually returned to his hometown, Chicago, his mother insisted on a funeral service with an open coffin, wanting the world to witness what had happened to her son at the hands of white men. Photographs of his body were published in Jet Magazine.

After a five-day trial and an hour of deliberation, an all-white, all-male jury acquitted his killers. Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam later confessed to the crime and have since died.

Emmett’s killing jolted the Black community and helped galvanize the civil rights movement. Shortly after his funeral, in December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Ala. She later said that she had been thinking about Emmett.

Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, who sponsored the Senate bill, said in a statement that Ms. Till-Mobley, who died in 2003, had “helped awaken the nation’s conscience, forcing America to reckon with its failure to address racism and the glaring injustices that stem from such hatred.”

Emmett’s killing, he added, was a “solemn reminder of the terror and violence experienced by Black Americans throughout our nation’s history.”

Emmett’s name is still invoked at protests against police violence across the United States.

“Emmett’s lynching shaped my understanding of racism at an early age and deeply affected Black Americans of my generation and those that followed,” Mr. Rush said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether Mr. Biden planned to sign the bill into law. In March, Mr. Biden signed a bill named for Emmett that made lynching a federal crime, punishable by up to 30 years in prison. The president’s signature ended more than a century of failed efforts to specifically outlaw lynching at the federal level.

The Congressional Gold Medal, awarded since the American Revolution, is Congress’s highest honor for citizens and institutions who have made “distinguished achievements and contributions,” according to the House of Representatives. Recipients include the aviator Charles Lindbergh, the American Red Cross and the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.