The parents of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown plan to take part this weekend in the 60th anniversary memorial of the murder of Emmett Till.
On Aug. 28, 1955, Till was beaten and shot for reportedly whistling at a white woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi. The body of the black 14-year-old from Chicago was discovered days later in the Tallahatchie River. The accused killers were later acquitted by an all-white jury.
Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral back home in Chicago, allowing tens of thousands of people to view his mutilated body, publicly illustrating the violence of Jim Crow segregation.
The anniversary of Till’s murder will be memorialized Friday with a motorcade processional from the site of his historic funeral at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, 4021 S. State St., to his grave at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip. Till’s family members and local dignitaries plan to speak at the burial site and a weekend of events hosted by Till’s relatives and the Mamie Till Mobley Memorial Foundation.
They chose a public memorial rather than a private ceremony at the cemetery “because of the climate of murder, the climate of injustice, in the present time,” said Airickca Gordon-Taylor, Till’s cousin and co-founder of the foundation.
Participants are expected to include the mother of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager fatally shot in 2012 in Sanford, Fla., by George Zimmerman, who claimed self-defense and was found not guilty of murder; the father of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager fatally shot in August 2014 in Ferguson, Mo., by a white police officer who was not indicted in connection with the shooting; and the mother of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea who was shot 41 times in 1999 by four plainclothes New York City police officers who were acquitted of all charges in his death, though his family later received a $3 million settlement in a civil lawsuit.
Gordon-Taylor said she sees parallels between these more recent cases and her cousin’s murder decades ago.
“People are losing their children,” said Gordon-Taylor, 45, of Olympia Fields. “Loss is loss. Tragedy is tragedy. We understand their pain. We understand injustice.”
Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, will be the keynote speaker at a dinner honoring Till on Friday. The Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. and the Rev. Al Sharpton are among scheduled speakers at a gospel service at 3 p.m. Sunday at Roberts Temple Church. For a complete list of events visit emmetttill60th.com.
