US President Joe Biden signed a proclamation on Tuesday establishing a national monument to honour Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley.

Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was abducted, tortured and murdered in Mississippi in 1955 — a horrific killing that helped to ignite the US civil rights movement.

Mr Biden told the signing ceremony, which was attended by dozens including Till family members, members of Congress and civil rights leaders, that: “Today, on what would have been Emmett’s 82nd birthday, we add another chapter in the story of remembrance and healing.”

The move comes as rightwingers in the US, mostly at the state and local levels, push legislation that limits the teaching of slavery and black history in public schools.

“At a time when there are those who seek to ban books and bury history, we’re making it clear, crystal clear,” Mr Biden said. 

Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a programme of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said: “We believe that not until black history matters will black lives and black bodies matter.”

“Through reckoning with America’s racist past, we have the opportunity to heal.”

Mr Biden’s proclamation protects places that are central to the story of Till’s life and death at age 14, the acquittal of his white killers by an all-white jury, and his late mother’s activism.

On the night of August 28 1955, Till was taken from his uncle’s home at gunpoint by two racist white men for allegedly flirting with the wife of one of his kidnappers.

Three days later his body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River.

Till’s late mother, Mamie, demanded that her son’s mutilated remains be taken back to Chicago for a public, open-casket funeral that was attended by tens of thousands of people. 

The published, graphic images of the body helped to fuel the emerging civil rights movement.