Moves made by Donald Trump’s administration could pave the way for the removal of a national monument honoring Emmett Till, an icon of the civil rights movement, risking a public outcry.

Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly led by tech boss Elon Musk, has recommended slashing the budget of the National Park Service by nearly $1 billion.

Meanwhile, a Justice Department opinion released earlier this month grants presidents the right to revoke the status of national monuments for the first time since the 1930s.

Together, the two steps could mean the demise of the Till memorial as part of Trump’s drive to eradicate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) values from public institutions, a culture war that has seen him attack the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., for promoting “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” and attempt to remould the Kennedy Center according to his own tastes, among other targets.

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“We are seeing this effort to erase and reverse history and historic preservation,” historian Alan Spears, senior director of cultural resources and government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, told CBS News.

“This is turning quickly into a dream deferred.”

Till, a Black Chicagoan, was just 14 when he was kidnapped in Mississippi on the night of August 28, 1955, by two white men who accused him of behaving disrespectfully towards a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her grocery store earlier in the day as he visited family in the town of Money.

The assailants were Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother, John W Milam, who beat, tortured, and eventually murdered Till, dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River, from which it was recovered three days later.

He was buried in Chicago, with his mother, Mamie, insisting on an open casket funeral while his killers went on to be acquitted by an all-white jury.

Remembered as a martyr to racial prejudice in America by the civil rights marchers of the 1960s and immortalised in song by Bob Dylan, Till was finally awarded a monument dedicated to his memory and that of his mother by Joe Biden in 2023.

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The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument covers three sites: Graball Landing in Mississippi, where Emmett’s body was found; Sumner in the same state, where Bryant and Miliam were tried in the local courthouse; and Chicago’s Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Illinois, where the boy’s funeral service was held.

Spears and his colleagues were influential voices in seeking federal protection for those sites, which was granted by Biden and could now be stripped away by Trump.

“Let’s make sure it doesn’t happen to anybody else’s son ever again,” the historian said in appealing for their upkeep.

He likened the proposed DOGE cuts to the National Parks Service to “amputating an arm for a hangnail.”

Former National Park Service director Chuck Sams, who left his role earlier this year, said the loss of the Till memorial would be “very sad and egregious.”

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“People don’t like to look at their past when it shows a negative light of who we are, and I can understand that nobody likes to look at their own personal past that may have a negative light, but we also know that in order to learn from our own history, we also have to learn from our past mistakes,” Sams said.

“And we, as Americans, have never been actually scared to do so, and I don’t think we should be now. We look at our past, and we know that from our past mistakes that we have become stronger.”

Other sites reportedly being considered for removal include the Chuckwalla and Sattitla Highlands national monuments in California, and the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona, the latter due to its reputed uranium resources.

White House spokesperson Anne Kelly responded to the threat to the monuments in a statement in which she said: “Under President Trump’s leadership, [Interior] Secretary [Doug] Burgum is keeping our parks ready for peak season, ensuring they are in pristine condition for visitors, and restoring truth and sanity to depictions of American history in line with the president’s executive order.

“The president is simultaneously following through on his promise to ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ and restore American energy dominance.”

Patti Carr Black, a cultural historian in Mississippi, was recognized Wednesday with the most recent addition to the Mississippi Writers Trail marker. 

Black grew up in Sumner before moving on to receive an education at Mississippi University for Women and Emory University. Afterwards, she spent many years producing works that have become vital to understanding the arts and literature of the Magnolia State. 

Just a few of her works include the book, Art in Mississippi: 1790-1980, a comprehensive study of the state’s visual arts and artists, along with studies on Walter Anderson, Eudora Welty, and many others. 

Black’s trail marker is the latest honor in a growing cabinet of superlatives for the writer, including major awards like the Mississippi Art Commission’s Governors Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.  

The new marker, unveiled Wednesday at the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson, joins a network of markers honoring Mississippi’s legendary writers, recognizing the places that shaped their stories, and their impact on the state’s cultural legacy. 

To learn more about the Mississippi Writers Trail, visit here. 

• Mississippi death row inmate Richard Jordan’s execution is scheduled for June 25th, amidst legal challenges to the state’s three-drug protocol.
• Jordan’s attorneys argue for the use of Pentobarbital, citing its effectiveness and availability due to a Trump-era executive order.
• Jordan’s clemency petition and request to meet with Governor Reeves are pending.

The quest to halt the execution of Mississippi prisoner Richard Jordan is speeding up as his execution date nears.

Jordan, at 79 is Mississippi’s oldest prisoner on death row and is the longest-serving. He’s been on death row since 1977, after he was convicted of capital murder in the kidnapping and murder of Edwina Marter, a Gulfport bank executive’s wife and mother of two young sons.

He is scheduled for execution on Wednesday, June 25, at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.

On Monday, June 16, Attorney General Lynn Fitch sent a letter as promised to U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate in response to a question he posed during a hearing Saturday, June 14, at the Thad Cochran Federal Courthouse in Jackson.

Wingate said Mississippi does not have a protocol in writing for the possibility of a prisoner injected with the sedative Midazolam responding to stimulation during a consciousness test conducted four minutes after the drug is administered.

If a prisoner responds to the consciousness test, the other two parts of the three-drug process of execution should not be given to the person, Jordan’s attorney James Craig said. He pointed out that the consciousness test was administered much sooner than four minutes for prisoners David Cox and Thomas Loden, who were executed in 2021 and 2022, and it is not clear whether they would have responded to pain after the second drug, a paralytic, was administered.

At the Saturday hearing, attorneys from Fitch’s office said the Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain would have the option to restart the process, which means giving the prisoner, in this instance, Jordan, another dose of 500 mg of Midazolam and doing another consciousness test or halt the execution.

But Wingate said the protocol wasn’t in writing and asked, before he wrote his opinion, if the state and Jordan would be willing to stop the execution until he could decide what should happen next.

Jordan and his attorneys agreed, but Wilson Minor, representing the state at the hearing, said he did not know if his client would be amenable to calling Judge Wingate in the event the consciousness test failed since there was no written protocol.

In Fitch’s letter to Wingate, filed Monday morning, she said the state indeed has a protocol that says Cain should restart the process. If the consciousness test fails a second time, he should halt the process and the court would decide what happens next. She did not specify which court.

“This is the proper course of action,” Fitch wrote. “The State’s execution protocol, like the ‘gold standard’ Oklahoma execution protocol, gives the Commissioner the discretion to restart the execution, and he should be allowed to exercise that discretion, and all other discretion under the State’s execution protocol.”

The hearing was in response to a lawsuit Jordan and others filed in 2015 challenging the three-drug protocol, saying it violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Jordan and his co-plaintiffs say chemical executions using Pentobarbital is more effective and assures a pain-free execution.

Pentobarbital has been in short supply and difficult to obtain since 2021, but on Jan. 20, the first day of President Donald Trump’s first day of his second term, he issued an executive order, Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety, to guarantee states access to the drugs needed to carry out executions.

Craig filed a letter in response to Fitch’s, saying Fitch did not directly answer Wingate’s question, but basicially said Cain should be allowed to exercise sole discretion over the execution process.

“Somewhat buried in this language is the fact that the Commissioner’s answer to the Court’s question is ‘No,’” Craig wrote. “Instead, the Commissioner insists that the MDOC Protocol gives him ‘the discretion to restart the execution, and he should be allowed to exercise that discretion, and all other discretion under the State’s execution protocol.’

“The Court is correctly concerned about the consequences of allowing Commissioner Cain unbridled discretion. Under Mr. Cain, after all, the ‘consciousness check’ language of the MDOC Protocol has been changed three different times: Nov. 12, 2021, Dec. 12, 2022, and May 25, 2025.”

Craig said the 2022 protocol changed the consciousness check to four minutes after the third drug was administered, “despite the fact that the third drug, potassium chloride, ‘interferes with the electrical signals that stimulate the contractions of the heart, inducing cardiac arrest.’ The notion that the consciousness check would be performed after cardiac arrest demonstrates a profound lack of understanding about the reason for the check.”

As of Wednesday evening, June 18, Wingate had not filed his opinion on the matter.

Jordan has a petition for an emergency stay of execution awaiting a decision in the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices had scheduled the matter for conference Wednesday but have not shared the results of their discussion.

Also on Wednesday, the Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood and others against capital punishment held another call for the state to “Stand Down” on the execution of Jordan.

Earlier this week, a petition was sent to Gov. Tate Reeves requesting an in-person interview where Jordan’s representatives could plead for clemency on his behalf.

“Richard Gerald Jordan requests that you commute his death sentence to the lesser penalty of life in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections without parole,” Jordan’s representative Frank D. Rosenblatt wrote on Monday. Mr. Jordan’s representatives also request a fifteen-minute in-person or virtual interview with you. It is the long-standing practice of the Office of the Governor in Mississippi to allow a fifteen to twenty-minute meeting with a death-sentenced inmate’s representatives.”

Reeves had not responded as of Wednesday evening.

On Monday, Eric Marter, the eldest son of Edwina and Charles Marter said neither he nor his father nor his brother Kevin would attend the execution.

Lici Beveridge is a reporter for the Hattiesburg American and the Clarion Ledger. Contact her at lbeveridge@gannett.com. Follow her on X  @licibev or Facebook at facebook.com/licibeveridge.