In October 2019, along a dusty stretch of a back road in northwestern Mississippi, workmen and activists installed a historical marker, the fourth one erected on this particular site. The workers sunk the heavy marker into the ground near a clearing called Graball Landing adjacent to where each year rows of cotton plants sprout their puffy white bolls ripe for harvest. The marker weighed over five hundred pounds. This was a consequence of its composition of half-inch-thick AR 500 steel sandwiched between three-quarter-inch Plexiglas panels to make it bulletproof. The unusual use of abrasion-resistant steel, a type of metal commonly used to withstand the punishing impact of mining and construction operations—as well as the force of bullets discharged on gun ranges—was necessitated by the historical event the marker commemorates: it marked the site where the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till was allegedly dragged out of the murky depths of the nearby Tallahatchie River.
While remote, the historical site has attracted unwarranted vandalism. Sometime in early 2019, for instance, three white University of Mississippi fraternity brothers posed proudly, one cradling a shotgun and another holding an AR-15 assault rifle, alongside their prey: the bright purple, bullet-riddled historical marker that identified one location—Graball Landing—along the trail of Till’s murder. The sign functioned as a fitting backdrop for a rite of passage into the fraternity of white supremacists. That marker, the third one, replaced a second memorial placard removed in 2016 because it had been repeatedly pockmarked by a combination of 317 bullets and shot gun pellets. Vandals stole and tossed the first sign placed in 2008 into the Tallahatchie River. Other markers, placed by the Emmett Till Memorial Commission (ETMC), the intrastate Civil Rights Trail organization, and other Alabama state organizations to designate important sites of Till’s lynching, have also been pocked with bullets or repeatedly defaced. This new marker, with its Plexiglass enclosure, is designed to resist the impact of bullets while also registering these racially motivated acts of vandalism. It serves as a record of past and ongoing anti-black violence.
The marker remembers Emmet Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy, who had been abducted and killed by two white vigilantes in the summer of 1955. The ruthless execution made national headlines when his mother Mamie Till Mobley (then Till Bradley) insisted upon an open casket at his funeral that exposed the barbaric murder of her son. The haunting images of the disfigured child and the devastating documentation of his grieving mother, photographed by David Johnson and published in Jet Magazine, stunned the nation. Taken together—the bulletproof commemorative marker and the images of Till—reveal how anti-black violence has and continues to influence who gets to tell historical narratives in the nation’s public spaces, especially in the Southern cities where thousands of monuments to the mythic “Lost Cause,” the failed effort to constitute the Confederate States of America, have created a tyrannical commemorative landscape.