White nationalists film protest videos in front of Emmett Till memorial
A group of white nationalists was caught filming protest videos in front of a new memorial for slain civil rights icon Emmett Till.
Security video from the Mississippi site captured eight people on Saturday filming a clip in front of a marker that was only dedicated two weeks earlier — after the first three signs there were all vandalized.
The group had two flags — including a white one with a large cross that is associated with the League of the South, a group the Southern Poverty Law Center neo-Confederate hate group.
“We are here at the Emmett Till monument that represents the civil rights movement for blacks. What we want to know is, where are all the white people?” one of the men says while being filmed.
The group quickly scatters when an alarm sounds at the memorial site in Sumner, thanks to a new high-tech security system there.
“This is the first incident we’ve seen of what appears to be white nationalists making a propaganda video,” Patrick Weems, the executive director of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission, .
The Emmett Till Interpretive Center , saying, “Thank them for reminding us why this work matters.”
Till was 14 when he was kidnapped, beaten and killed in a 1955 lynching after he allegedly whistled at a white woman. An all-white jury in Mississippi acquitted two white men of murder charges.
The memorial is at the site where Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River.
The camera system and alarms are part of an updated security system that accompanies a new bulletproof memorial after the first three markers were all vandalized.
The first, placed at the site in 2008, was tossed in the river where Till’s body had been dumped after he was lynched. The second and third markers all had to be replaced after they were shot at and left riddled with bullet holes.
The final one was replaced soon after three fraternity brothers from the University of Mississippi posed in front of the bullet-riddled sign while holding a shotgun and AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.
The new 500-pound steel sign now has a glass bulletproof front, Weems said.
With Post wires