U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday will honor Emmett Till, the Black teenager whose 1955 killing helped galvanize the Civil Rights movement, and his mother with a national monument across two states.
Till, 14 and visiting from Chicago, was beaten, shot and mutilated in Money, Mississippi, on Aug. 28, 1955, four days after a 21-year-old white woman accused him of whistling at her. His body was dumped in a river.
The violent killing put a spotlight on the U.S. civil rights cause after his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, held an open-casket funeral and a photo of her son's badly disfigured body appeared in Black media.
The national monument designation across 5.7 acres (2.3 hectares) and three sites marks a forceful new effort by the President to memorialize the country's bloody racial history even as Republicans in some states push limits on how that past is taught.
"America is changing, America is making progress," said the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., 84, a cousin of Till's who was with the boy on the night he was abducted at gunpoint from the relatives' house they were staying at in Mississippi.
"I've seen a lot of changes over the years and I try to tell young people that they happen, but they happen very slow," Parker said on Monday in a telephone interview as he traveled from Chicago to Washington to attend the signing ceremony at the White House as one of approximately 60 guests.
Tuesday marks the 82nd anniversary of Till's birth in 1941. One of the monument sites is the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Till's funeral took place.
The other selected sites are in Mississippi: Graball Landing, close to where Till's body is believed to be have been recovered; and Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, where two white men who later confessed to Till's killing were acquitted by an all-white jury.
Signs erected at Graball Landing since 2008 to commemorate Till's killing have been repeatedly defaced by gunfire.
Now that site and the others will be considered federal property, receiving about $180,000 a year in funding from the National Park Service. Any future vandalism would be investigated by federal law enforcement rather than local police, according to Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi.
Other such monuments include the Grand Canyon, Statue of Liberty and the laboratory of inventor Thomas Edison.
Biden, an 80-year-old Democrat, will likely need strong support from Black voters to secure a second term in the 2024 presidential election.
He screened a film recounting the lynching, "Till," at the White House in February. Last March, he signed into law a bipartisan bill named for Till that for the first time made lynching a federal hate crime.
A Republican field led by former President Donald Trump has made conservative views on race and other contentious issues of history a part of their platform, including banning books and fighting efforts to teach school children accounts of the country's past that they regard as ideologically inflected or unpatriotic.
"This is an amazing, teachable moment to talk about the importance of this story as an American story that everybody can share in now, particularly at a time when people are trying to rewrite history," said Christopher Benson, president of the non-profit organization the Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley Institute in Summit, Illinois.
“We have a memorial now that is not erasable. It can't be banned and it can't be censored, and we think that's a very important thing.”
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The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Wes Anderson)
26/02/2024
The Darjeeling Limited is a 2007 film directed by Wes Anderson, written by Anderson himself together with Roman Coppola and actor Jason Schwartzman.
The film, preceded by the short film Hotel Chevalier, with which it was distributed, was presented in competition at the 64th Venice International Film Festival. The film is a comedy with dramatic overtones, set in India mainly in the Rajasthan region, starring the three Whitman brothers, Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman).
Many scenes in the film - including the Himalayan ones - were not shot in Darjeeling area. The filming locations are practically all located in the state of Rajasthan, in the towns of Jodhpur and Udaipur.
On the other hand, there is a tourist train, the "Toy Train", which passes through Darjeeling, administered by the Darjeeling Himalayan company.
There are four characters in the film who only appear in cameos: Bill Murray, Irrfan Khan, Natalie Portman and Camilla Rutherford. In the cameo in which Bill Murray appears, he is seen chasing the train, which is leaving without being able to reach him, like the brothers do. A mystery is linked to his character: is he the ghost of the deceased father of the three or is it someone else?
Towards the end of the film there is a cameo in which Natalie Portman appears for about 8 seconds, while the camera moves from one carriage of the train to another. She finds herself in a yellow room identical to the one in the Hotel Chevalier from the prequel.
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One thing abt this "evidentiary hearing" in Fulton Co
Now Y'all see in rt what BlkWomn endure daily
I can say w/certainty that DA Willis has been disrespected, undermined, 2nd guessed, gaslit, qualifications questioned & side-eyed abt her purse more than once before
Misogynoir
I’ll never forgive it!
and the whole trial was just an distraction to prosecute her for nothing while tfg is still running for president again despite having 91 indictments against him and forced to pay back millions of dollars!!!!
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