Interior secretary tours civil rights sites in Mississippi

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Interior Secretary Deb Haaland toured Mississippi civil rights sites Tuesday, seeing the crumbling rural store that's part of the history of the 1955 lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till and touring the home where state NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963.

Haaland traveled with White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory and Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson. The sites are in Thompson's district, which encompasses the Delta flatlands and much of Mississippi's capital city of Jackson.

Standing outside the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, Haaland said the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior are looking to expand opportunities for people to learn about the civil rights movement.

“Today, I was so honored to learn, to listen, to hear from people who have been on the ground working in this for decades," said Haaland, a former New Mexico congresswoman who is the first Native American to lead a Cabinet department.

Haaland said she heard from young people who did not learn about Till while they were in school but have learned about him since then.

Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago, was visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta when he was abducted, tortured and killed after witnesses said he whistled at a white woman working in a grocery store in the small town of Money. No one was ever convicted of killing Till and the Justice Department announced in December that it was ending its investigation into his lynching.

The killing galvanized the civil rights movement after Till’s mother insisted on an open casket, and Jet magazine published photos of his brutalized body.

“It's important that we educate our children because they deserve to know the history of our...