President Biden has designated a national monument across three locations in Illinois and Mississippi honoring Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. On August 28, 1955, a white mob dragged Emmett Till from his great-uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi, and lynched him. The 14-year-old African American boy had traveled that summer to the segregated South from his home in Chicago. Today would have been Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday. Over the weekend, residents of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood celebrated the occasion with an ice cream social outside his childhood home, and they paid homage to Till at the Roberts Temple Church of Christ, which has just been designated a national monument. It was inside the church that Till’s brutally beaten and disfigured body was displayed in an open casket at his funeral. This is Chicago resident Quintella Bounds.

Quintella Bounds: “I want to say it’s a blessing, because so often they want to erase the events that happened to African Americans, but you can’t erase it if it’s a landmark.”