Six days after white supremacists filmed a video at the new, bulletproof Emmett Till memorial that caused a social media uproar, $20,000 has been donated to the Emmett Till Interpretive Center.
Security footage showed eight members of the white supremacist group, the League of the South, gathered around the Emmett Till memorial waving both the Mississippi state and a League of the South flag on Saturday. A security alarm was sounded, and the group scattered.
“Thanks to the white supremacist group that visited our marker to 14 year-old, Emmett Till. Because of you: we raised $20,000, two major foundations contacted us and we have had countless visitors to our museum, website and 3,000 new twitter followers,” the Emmett Till Interpretive Center tweeted.
Patrick Weems, the executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, said that he thought that it was great that the Emmett Till Interpretive Center received more publicity after the white supremacists visited the memorial.
Weems also referenced this year’s incident involving then-members of Kappa Alpha fraternity posing with guns in front of the Till memorial, saying that people will continue to mock the sign because they will likely face no consequences.
“We’re able to control the narrative and put a positive spin on the situation,” Weems said. “The only way to stop (this hatred) is for people to stand up for this type of thing.”
It was discovered later that the League of the South was at the memorial to make a propaganda video.
“What we want to know is, where are all the white people over the last 50 years that have been murdered, assaulted and raped by blacks going to be memorialized like this? We are League of the South,” League of the South leader Michael Hill said in the video.
The League of the South is a white supremacist, neo-Confederate group based in Killen, Alabama. According to their website, their goal is to have a “free and independent Southern republic.”
The new memorial, which replaced three previous versions that were vandalized, was installed last month.
The memorial they were surrounding marks where Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy, was found after being kidnapped, tortured and lynched by two white men in Money, Mississippi in 1955.
