Emmett Till memorial in Mississippi could be removed as part of DOGE-recommended $1 billion cuts to national parks
Moves made by Donald Trump’s administration could pave the way for the removal of a national monument honoring Emmett Till, an icon of the civil rights movement, risking a public outcry.
Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly led by tech boss Elon Musk, has recommended slashing the budget of the National Park Service by nearly $1 billion.
Meanwhile, a Justice Department opinion released earlier this month grants presidents the right to revoke the status of national monuments for the first time since the 1930s.
Together, the two steps could mean the demise of the Till memorial as part of Trump’s drive to eradicate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) values from public institutions, a culture war that has seen him attack the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., for promoting “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” and attempt to remould the Kennedy Center according to his own tastes, among other targets.
“We are seeing this effort to erase and reverse history and historic preservation,” historian Alan Spears, senior director of cultural resources and government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, told CBS News.
“This is turning quickly into a dream deferred.”
Till, a Black Chicagoan, was just 14 when he was kidnapped in Mississippi on the night of August 28, 1955, by two white men who accused him of behaving disrespectfully towards a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her grocery store earlier in the day as he visited family in the town of Money.
The assailants were Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother, John W Milam, who beat, tortured, and eventually murdered Till, dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River, from which it was recovered three days later.
He was buried in Chicago, with his mother, Mamie, insisting on an open casket funeral while his killers went on to be acquitted by an all-white jury.
Remembered as a martyr to racial prejudice in America by the civil rights marchers of the 1960s and immortalised in song by Bob Dylan, Till was finally awarded a monument dedicated to his memory and that of his mother by Joe Biden in 2023.
The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument covers three sites: Graball Landing in Mississippi, where Emmett’s body was found; Sumner in the same state, where Bryant and Miliam were tried in the local courthouse; and Chicago’s Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Illinois, where the boy’s funeral service was held.
Spears and his colleagues were influential voices in seeking federal protection for those sites, which was granted by Biden and could now be stripped away by Trump.
“Let’s make sure it doesn’t happen to anybody else’s son ever again,” the historian said in appealing for their upkeep.
He likened the proposed DOGE cuts to the National Parks Service to “amputating an arm for a hangnail.”
