The president of the USA Joe Biden honor him today, Tuesday Emmett Till, the African-American teenager whose murder, in 1955, fueled the Civil Rights movement, as well as his mother, with a national monument spanning two states and three locations and a call for Americans to learn their homeland’s history.

President Biden, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, signed a proclamation establishing the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Memorial in Illinois and Mississippi.

14-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago had gone to visit relatives in Mississippi. On August 28, 1955, he was beaten, shot, and mutilated in Maney, Mississippi, four days after a 21-year-old white woman claimed he blew the whistle on her. His body was thrown into a river.

His brutal killing brought the Civil Rights movement into the spotlight after his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, organized his open-casket funeral and a photo of the disfigured corpse was published in African-American media.

The national monument covers the whole an area of ​​23 acres and it is a new attempt by the president to highlight the bloody, racist history of the country, at the same time that in some states the Republicans put limits on how and what will be taught in schools.

“Darkness and denial of reality can hide a lot, but they don’t erase anything,” Biden told his guests in the Indian Treaty Room, next to the White House, before signing his proclamation. “We can’t just pick and choose what we want to know,” he added.

Today marks the 82nd anniversary of Till’s birth in 1941. The three locations chosen to honor his memory are the church where the funeral service was held in Chicago, Grable Landing, Mississippi, near where his body was found, and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse where the two white men who confessed to the murder were acquitted by an all-white jury .

Plaques placed at Grable Landing in Till’s memory after 2008 were constantly vandalized, by strangers shooting at them. Now the site will be considered federal property and funded with $180,000 a year by the National Park Service. Any future vandalism will be investigated by the FBI and not by the local police, according to Patrick Weems, the executive director of an Emmett Till foundation in Summer, Mississippi.

This category of monuments includes the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty and inventor Thomas Edison’s workshop.

Emmett Till

“America is changing, America is moving forward,” said the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., 84, Till’s cousin, who was with him the night the boy was abducted at gunpoint from his relatives’ home in Mississippi. “I’ve seen a lot of change over the years, and I try to tell young people that it’s happening, but it’s happening slowly,” he added in a phone interview while traveling from Chicago to Washington to attend the ceremony.

Biden will likely need the support of African-American voters if he wants to secure a second term in the 2024 presidential election. In February, a film recounting the lynching of Emmett Till was screened at the White House. In March, he signed a bipartisan bill bearing Till’s name that made lynching a federal hate crime for the first time.

A group of Republicans, led by former President Donald Trump, have adopted conservative views on race and other controversial historical topics and are trying to ban books or ban the teaching of historical events they deem ideologically charged or “unpatriotic.”

“Today, there are those in our nation who would rather erase or even rewrite the ugly parts of our past, those who try to teach that slaves benefited from slavery,” Vice President Kamala Harris said at the event, in a clear reference to remarks reportedly made last week by Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSandisthat some slaves had the opportunity to “learn a trade.”