WASHINGTON – Congress should give the nation’s highest civilian honor posthumously to Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, a Republican and a Democratic senator said Wednesday.Sens.
Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., said the Congressional Gold Medal is long overdue for the Till family. Till was a black teenager lynched in Mississippi in 1955 by white men who were later acquitted despite eyewitness testimony tying them to the killing.
He had been accused of whistling at a white woman.Mamie Till-Mobley demanded an open-casket funeral for her son in Chicago. A photograph of Till’s brutalized body galvanized the Civil Rights movement.