Emmett Till Sign Will No Longer Be the Same

A civil rights landmark that got some disturbing press this week is being replaced—with a bulletproof version, NBC News reports. The memorial to Emmett Till, the Mississippi teen tortured and murdered in 1955, recently appeared in an Instagram photo with three white University of Mississippi students holding guns. Now the 50-pound sign near Glendora, Miss., has been removed for a pending 500-pound replacement of reinforced steel. For Patrick Weems, head of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission, it's just one episode in a long history of vandalism.

"We're under no naiveté that this is going to end," he says. "The manufacturers said that this is a bulletproof sign. We'll test that theory." Indeed, Time reports that earlier markers have been thrown in a river, riddled with bullets, covered in acid, stolen, and marred with KKK graffiti, per the commission. The next sign will be located roughly 150 yards away, closer to the Tallahatchie River, where the 14-year-old's body was recovered—a key moment in sparking the Civil Rights Movement, notes Fox 2. "We won't stop," says a reverend who oversees the commission's finances. "There will be another sign up ... Because this legacy and this story, it's much bigger than any of us." (More Emmett Till stories.)