Clarifying and Re-etching in public memory public relations: The case of the till and Till-Mobley National Monument,its presidential proclamation,and president Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order

Abstract

In this study, we advance public memory in public relations scholarship by adding clarifying and re-etching actions to the list of processes (blurring, erasure, or etching) encapsulated in the public memory dialectic. Additionally, we offer PR of Witnessing and PR of Sanitizing to the PR tools of clarifying and re-etching; PR of Witness and PR of Sanitizing serve as a set of contexts and rhetorical clues that scholars, critics, and practitioners alike can use to sense the distinction between re-etching and clarifying efforts that are intended to reckon with or cleanse public memory. Via critical essay, we interrogate the remarks by then-U.S. President Joe Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris at the public event signing as well as the promulgation of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument Proclamation. Additionally, we interrogate President Donald J. Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” Executive Order. By grappling directly with the politicalization of public memory, we move beyond analysis and classification strategies to provide a more robust lens for engaging the massively entrenched power systems behind the highest levels of public memory debate, such as those regarding the United States’ complicated history with race and discrimination.

Introduction

Issues can be defined as contestable questions of fact, value, or policy that affect how stakeholders seek organizational or societal changes through public policy as well as how they grant or withhold support to and from organizations (Waymer and Heath, 2023b). Was COVID-19 pandemic as deadly or as catastrophic as many media outlets reported (contestable question of fact)? Is global warming real or a hoax (contestable question of fact)? Debates over contestable questions of facts shape societal values and often lead to arguments over policy action or inaction. Are greenhouse emissions bad for the planet; should preserving the planet for future generations and thwarting polar cap melt be a global priority? (contestable question of value)? Were COVID-19 masking and quarantine mandates necessary or vital (contestable question of policy)? Facts, values, and policies are indeed contestable and are never static. As such, scholars in issues management argue that issues never die; rather, they might be resolved temporarily or might lie dormant waiting for a trigger to reignite the issue.

To elucidate this point further, consider dominant framings of US citizenship that support White nationalism or Eurocentric interests. This issue has been recurring and contested, with different ethnic groups in the crosshairs (e.g. Irish immigrants of the 1840s-1860s, Italian immigrants of the early 1900s, and individuals of Latin origin in the early 2000s to present). So, to scholars in issues management, it is not surprising that shortly after the great racial reckoning in the United States and arguably globally following the tragic deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in 2020 (see Waymer 2021), that just 4 years later, the pendulum has shifted. In 2025, several major companies have rolled back or abandoned diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the face of a growing “anti-woke” movement (Dumas, 2025). In short, facts are continually contested and relitigated in the public sphere, and that relitigating continually (re) shapes and (re)constitutes public memory (Houdek and Phillips, 2017). Hence, when a celebrity such as Kanye West makes a claim that African American enslavement in the United States was a “choice” (Kaur, 2018)—which we as authors believe is an erroneous statement—many argue that vigilant efforts must be made to refute or contest a particular “erroneous” statement made as fact. In a similar vein, when Florida’s state education curriculum mandates the revised teaching (blurring and erasing) of the history of African Americans, which emphasizes positive aspects of slavery--such as the opportunity some slaves had to learn trades by which they could benefit (Chavez, 2023), such positive “slavery as job training” narratives blur atrocity which produces moral insult and loss of African American agency. In similar fashion, people have arisen to challenge these claims made as statements of fact (Kim, 2023).

In that vein, public relations scholars have examined the ways actors strategically use public relations to help tell, interpret, make, and shape societal memory (Heath and Waymer, 2019, 2022). In this study, we advance public memory in public relations scholarship by adding clarifying and re-etching actions to the list of processes (blurring, erasure, or etching) encapsulated in the public memory dialectic. Additionally, we offer PR of Witness and PR of Sanitizing as modifiers to the PR tools of clarifying and re-etching; PR of Witness and PR of Sanitizing serve as a set of contexts and rhetorical clues that scholars, critics, and practitioners alike can use to sense the distinction between re-etching and clarifying efforts that are used to reckon with or cleanse public memory. Via critical essay, we interrogate the remarks by then-U.S. President Joe Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris at the public event signing as well as the promulgation of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument Proclamation. Additionally, we interrogate President Donald J. Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” Executive Order. By grappling directly with the politicalization of public memory, we move beyond analysis and classification strategies to provide a more robust lens for engaging the massively entrenched power systems behind the highest levels of public memory debate, such as those regarding the United States’ complicated history with race and discrimination.

This study is important because it extends our understanding and conceptualization of public memory public relations. For example, one relevant study argued that societal memory occurs as a dialectic; some etched version of history (i.e., thesis) comes under question (i.e., antithesis), and through either a process of blurring, erasure, or etching, that history is then muddied, expunged, or lives on (i.e., synthesis) (Waymer and Heath, 2023a). That study’s authors used the January 6, 2021 United States presidential election (Congressional Certification) Capitol “protest event” to highlight the concept of strategic blurring. Strategic blurring occurs when public relations efforts are used to camouflage, distort, or blur societal memory by creating alternative versions of lived truth, values, or norms.

In this study we showcase the dialectical tensions within public relations strategies of etching, re-etching, and clarifying, particularly by powerful institutional voices. We examine the remarks by then-U.S. President Biden and then-Vice President Harris at the public event signing and promulgation of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument Proclamation; we then turn to President Trump’s 2025 Executive Order on Sanity: Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. Taken together, our analysis reveals concerning trends about potential corrective–or concealing—power public relations has for countering blurring, erasure, and their adverse implications for achieving social justice. We argue that publics and audiences should be given as much and as accurate information as possible so they can make an enlightened choice (Heath, 2006) about which versions of competing public memory narratives they should support.

The Emmett Till case: A family visit became a national atrocity

To understand this case fully, it is important to understand its historical backdrop. Emmett Till was murdered by White men in Mississippi during the height of Jim Crow. Jim Crow laws were local and state laws enacted in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation (Berrey, 2015).

Emmett Louis Till was born in Chicago. During summer break from school in 1955, Emmett, a 14-year-old boy, asked permission and then begged successfully to visit his family, especially his cousins, in Money, Mississippi (Harold and DeLuca, 2005). Before Till boarded the train, his mother warned him to be very cautious around southern White people, to not call attention to himself by acting in ways that could be interpreted as threatening or offensive, especially to White women (Thompson, 2024). This conversation is called “the talk” or “the warning.” African American culture features many such counternarratives (Erby, 2021). This survival-oriented counternarrative is protective against offense, brutality, lynchings, or discursive white macro-narratives of control. With this warning in mind, Emmett Till and his 16-year-old cousin, Wheeler Parker Jr, left Chicago on a train that took them to visit their Uncle Moses Wright and his wife and their cousins.

Till, at age 14, was a husky, stocky, muscular, even chubby young man, five foot five, and weighing 160 pounds. He dressed not like poor southern Black people, denim work clothes and heavy shoes, from Money, Mississippi; rather, he wore beige slacks and penny loafers. Adultification of Till (based on his physical characteristics) figured significantly in the court strategy of presenting him as dangerous (see Nave, 2018). According to the Center for Policing Equity Staff (2023),

It has always been so for Black children in this country, since well before the nation’s founding. Treated by White society as expendable, an enslaved workforce, a nuisance, or a menace, Black children are not just dehumanized along with the rest of their communities but routinely treated as if they were adults, their childhood dismissed, denied, and stolen, with those responsible only rarely held to account. (para 3)

In August 1955, Emmett Louis Till, a young Black boy, was brutally tortured and murdered by two White men (Harold and DeLuca, 2005). Today, a sign is posted at the location of the Bryant store where Till’s alleged offensive acts against Carolyn Bryant, a White woman, were committed. Because of his alleged afront to White women’s safety, Till was murdered.

Authorities and some of his relatives wanted to bury Emmett’s body in Mississippi. To obscure facts of the murder, authorities poured lime around his body to accelerate decomposition (Till-Mobley and Benson, 2004). However, Till’s mother insisted, agentically, that his body be brought to Chicago; an undertaker complied with her wishes. After viewing her son’s battered body, she insisted that his funeral casket be open, so everyone could see. Jet Magazine photographed Emmett’s disfigured face and published it in its September 15, 1955, issue. Other issues of the magazine publicized Till’s tragedy, challenging whether Mississippi could whitewash (blur or erase) Till’s murder. Mainstream media ran the Till story.

This publicity attracted a sizable gathering to his funeral (The Smithsonian, n.d). The Chicago Defender estimated that more than 100,000 people, during a 4-day viewing period, passed by Till’s body in a glass-enclosed casket (Till-Mobley and Benson, 2004). Mamie Till-Mobley etched Emmett Till’s name, life, and death into the American social justice narrative.

Recently, the Biden Administration created a memorial, dedicated by Proclamation, to commemorate this tragic moment in United States history and to celebrate the tenacity and courage by Till’s mother to make this atrocity public (Biden, 2023).

Biden alongside Harris, issued a federal proclamation on July 25, 2023, to honor the memory of Emmett Till and his stalwart mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Fewer than 100 people were in attendance, but the audience was composed of members of the Till family, members of Congress, and civil rights leaders. The ceremony was available to watch live, and it was covered by various news organizations. The Proclamation featured this theme: “The brutal lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 and the subsequent courage of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, to ensure his death would not be in vain helped bring broad national attention to the injustices and inequality that Black people experienced during the Jim Crow era across the United States and, in particular, the South” (Biden, 2023).

Pressed by Black leaders, Biden and Harris along with Deb Haaland, former Secretary of the Interior, and Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr created Till’s National Memorial to reinforce the notion that Mamie Till-Mobley’s efforts to publicize her son’s murder must never to be ignored or forgotten (Thompson, 2024). Hence, days before what would have been Emmett Till’s 82^nd birthday, the protective weight of the National Park system went into effect to place and protect memorials at three sites: The riverbank (Graball Landing) where Till’s body was found in the river, the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse where the trial of Till’s murder occurred, and the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ (Chicago’s South Side) where the casket was purposefully and strategically open for Till’s funeral (Morrison and Pettus, 2023). This public memorial and the accompanying statements represent the United States Government’s organizational rhetorical voice (Boyd and Waymer, 2011) and serve as a form of government public relations (Waymer, 2013).

We now juxtapose this memorial with one of the executive orders issued by President Trump in 2025.

Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order

In 2025 President Trump issued a series of executive orders that specifically targeted and attacked the issue of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). On the heels of these executive orders, on March 27, 2025, he issued the “Restoring Truth and Sanity To American History” executive order—which is highly relevant to this current study. Given that this policy was issued by President Trump and appears on the official webpage of the United States Government, we argue that this executive order also represents the United States Government’s organizational voice (Waymer, 2009) and acts as bona fide government public relations tactic.

Several news outlets and historians have labeled this executive order as a political attempt to whitewash history “under the guise of eliminating anti-American ideology” (Brandt and Snyder, 2025 para 7); “many historians are sounding an alarm and say the president is going too far. Critics worry that the executive actions taken together, for instance, would minimize or even erase achievements by women and minorities” (Chappell, 2025, para. 5-6). Per the executive order, the president stated: “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth” (The White House, 2025, para 1), and that the prior Biden presidential administration “advanced this corrosive ideology” (The White House, 2025, para 2). Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia (one of the entities singled out in the president’s executive order) was concerned that the executive order could do a “disservice to a complete understanding of history” (Brandt and Snyder, 2025, para 6): Steinke continued:

Our job as historians is to examine history, the good, the bad, and the ugly and tell the full story. Because it’s only by understanding the full story that we can improve, we can get better over time…To interfere with it for political reasons or because someone wants to tell a sort of sanitized version is just wrong. (Brandt and Snyder, 2025, para 8)

This case is a quintessential example of a clash of narratives. Further, this clash of narratives demonstrates that blurring, erasure, and etching recur at crucial moments in the search for social justice.

Review of public memory and narrative/counternarrative research in public relations

Memorials tell a story (Veil et al., 2011), often commenting on or contextualizing challenging social political issues (Xifra and Heath, 2018). They present facts, convey values, and are place-bound (context). They invite community members to sort out discursively agentic implications of issues of fact, value, policy, identity, identification, and place (Waymer and Heath, 2023b). In the Till case, these continue to be recurring issues now nearly 70 years later (Thompson, 2024). When issues of race and marginalization are involved as in this case, such a memorial, as counternarrative, is vital because “Systemic and structural racism are particularly harmful because they tend to operate invisibly as the taken-for-granted norm, stealthily sustaining racial inequity, and injustice” (Logan, 2023: p. 293).

United States museums such as the Smithsonian began to highlight such historical injustices via its exhibits; the executive order, which targets the Smithsonian specifically, is intentionally designed to dull or even nullify those narratives. Lindsey Halligan, an American lawyer who has been appointed to work with Vice President JD Vance to “remove improper ideology of weaponizing history” from prominent United States museums such as the Smithsonian, stated in a report, “We don’t need to overemphasize the negative to teach people certain aspects of our nation’s history may have been bad” (emphasis added by authors) (Times of India, 2025, para 3).

Narrative simply, but profoundly, is the imposition of story on the behaviors of humans because they need narrative continuity to operate strategically in societal and communal contexts. Humans are storytellers (Fisher, 1985, 1989), and stories have normative and epistemic implications; they guide behavior and tell us what we want to know, at least to believe (Sellnow, 2018). Sellnow continued:

The essential human activities of planning, enacting plans, reacting to the unexpected, experiencing new people, places, and events, and reflecting on experiences all create communicative space that is filled by the stories we create. The stories we generate and share serve an interpretative function that assists us in determining the meaning and relevance of events. (p. 970)

In that vein, this critical interpretive case study highlights the textuality of narratives and demonstrates how they not only help us determine meaning and relevance of events but are highly subject to the strengths and foibles of human dialectics. As Waymer and Heath (2023a) concluded:

The rhetorical (discursively scientific) assumption is that a major value of discourse is its ability to come as close as possible to informed knowledge that can sustain narrative continuity. In reality, rhetorical strategies are used competitively to create memories that can privilege some interests and harm others. (p. 4)

The dialectical tensions of public memory and narrative include the strategic communicative processes of etching, blurring, and erasing. Such communicative processes demonstrate the import of clarifying, particularly as a form of counternarrative and fact agency.

A small but robust body of literature addressing issues of memory in public relations has emerged over the past decade (Coombs and Holliday, 2019; Fitch, 2015; McDermott and Anderson, 2022; Taylor et al., 2025; Waymer and Logan, 2016; Waymer and Street, 2015), and it is important to note that several influential articles in this vein were published in a special issue in Public Relations Inquiry in 2015. No such issue on the subject has been published since. A noted stream of research has sought to conceptualize and interrogate public relations’ role in shaping public memory. Most relevant to this current study are three concepts that help unpack the narrative continuity tensions relevant to Emmett Till’s death, its subsequent memorialization by Biden and Harris in the civil rights movement, and President Trump’s counter response in his executive order on American history. The three concepts are: Blurring (Waymer and Heath, 2023a), erasing (Veil and Waymer, 2021; Waymer and Heath, 2019, 2023a), and etching (Waymer and Heath, 2019). Blurring is the strategic attempt to “obscure, to cause to be intellectually indistinguishable, or to make hazy, unclear, or indistinct in appearance or outline” (Waymer and Heath, 2023a: p. 4). Erasing, the strategic process to make (or at least attempt to make) something important disappear, go away, is not limited to “returning to truth or obliterating falsity”; in fact, that conceptualization is limiting. “Erasure can be used to destroy truth…Erasure is multifaceted. It can be used to remove falsehoods or to hide truth” (Waymer and Heath, 2023a: p. 4). The third concept in this logic is etching; like marks made on an Etch-a Sketch, powerful textual remnants of prior statements and actions become so embedded that they endure and resist complete erasure or blurring. Memories, as Sigmund Freud argued, are virtually impossible to completely erase, and therefore are etched in some shape or form (Waymer and Heath, 2019).

Our analysis adds a fourth concept: clarifying. That concept adds to the body of literature on memory in public relations theory. While different versions of narratives can and do exist, clarifying matters is the strategic attempt to unmask lies or half-truths, whether well-intentioned or duplicitous. Using pictures of Till’s body as textual evidence of racialized atrocity, the civil rights movement etched important facts, values, policies, identities, identifications, and place into the prevailing narrative continuity of social justice. Supportive of that effort, Biden’s and Harris’s public memorial speeches and policy actions sought to re-etch this corrective narrative by clarifying that remnants of the atrocities of the past that led to the murder of Till remain present today. Conversely, President Trump via executive order argues that American history in recent years has been blurred by the President Biden administration whereby that administration’s “revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light” (The White House, 2025, para 2). What we witness here are different, competing versions of the same narrative both of which are using similar public relations strategies to argue for “clarification” of memory. Both versions of the narrative are under analysis in this essay.

With this conceptual foundation established, we next discuss the texts and means by which we analyze them.

Methods and texts for analysis

To conduct the following analysis, we undertake an analytical approach familiar to critical public relations scholars (see Waymer and Hill, 2024). The critical essay is a form of scholarly writing used by rhetorically oriented, text-based academics. This form of scholarly analysis evaluates the textual works produced by others (see Pirie, 2002). This analysis examines public statements made by then-President Biden and then-Vice President Harris at the signing of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, and it also analyzes Biden’s concurrent presidential proclamation (Biden, 2023). It also analyzes the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order issued by current-President Trump.

One reason we selected these texts for analysis is because engagement with these topics on social media, primarily on X (formerly known as Twitter), reflect virality. According to Bluehost (2025), “Virality on X focuses more on the volume of interactions rather than just view counts” (para 37). Consider the following:

A post with tens of thousands of reposts and likes is generally considered viral. The platform’s fast-paced, text-heavy nature makes it ideal for sharp, concise content like memes, breaking news or witty one-liners.

Since posts on X have a shorter lifespan compared to other platforms, timing plays a crucial role. Aligning your content with trending topics or leveraging viral hashtags significantly increases its chances of flooding users’ feeds. (para 37-38)

Using NetBase Quid to conduct a text-based data analysis, we found the following:

⁃ Search Terms: “Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument”; “Emmett Till and Mamie Till Mobley National Monument”

⁃ Tracking from July 25 - August 1, 2023 (7 days)

⁃ Volume of Posts: 30,995 posts

⁃ Total Engagements: 269,713 engagements

⁃ Falloff for engagement occurred around July 26, 2023 1 day after the initial announcement

⁃ 97.8% (n = 30,320) of the posts were found on X

We conducted a similar query for President’s Trump executive order. We found the following:

⁃ Search terms: “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”

⁃ Tracking from March 27 - April 3, 2025 (7 days)

⁃ Volume of Posts: 6304 posts

⁃ Total Engagements: 95,903 engagements

⁃ Engagement peaked on March 28, 2025 with the falloff for engagement occurring 1 day later around March 29, 2025

⁃ 58.7% (n = 3700) of the posts were found on X; 23.5% (n = 1482) of coverage was provided by various news outlets

In short, audiences and publics were exposed to and engaging with both texts.

In sum, we watched the broadcast and read the transcript of the ceremony and took detailed notes. We read and discussed the Proclamation. We read and analyzed the executive order. We compared our evaluations and weighed our reactions before organizing and writing this critical essay. Our analysis argues that public memory is always open to (re)interpretation and at times requires actions, including publicity, to re-etch and to clarify in order to combat blurring or erasure that misrepresents historical events.

Analysis

Our analysis reveals textual themes actors strategically use to clarify some matter in the public memory space: (1) tell the truth; (2) repeatedly share the full history and tell the most complete account possible, whether flattering or shameful; (3) encourage and challenge publics to avoid selective, biased learning about an issue; and (4) actively combat attempts to erroneously blur, misrepresent, or distort the matter. We use these themes to critically examine supporting texts from relevant actors. Our focus is the strategic publicity of atrocity. Additionally, our analysis reveals three more ways that actors strategically use public memory for public relations purposes: (5) using public memory as image management and image repair; (6) using erasing and blurring as means to shape public memory; (7) using re-etching strategies as a means to shape public memory. These three additional ways of examining how actors shape public memory is the result of our analysis of the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order.

We begin by analyzing remarks by then-U.S. President Joe Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris at the public event signing as well as the promulgation of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument Proclamation.

Tell the truth; make key issues crystal clear

Scholars representing the critical tradition argue that truth is not absolute or universal; rather, it is dependent on social and historical text in context. Such ambiguity or lack of concreteness might appear on its face to undermine the ability for an organization or social actor to pursue and tell whole-truths or as close to whole-truths as possible. By as accurately as possible conveying the events that occurred within their historical context, one can be judged to be telling the truth. Harris stated: “We gather to remember an act of astonishing violence and hate and to honor the courage of those who called upon on our nation to look with open eyes at that horror and to act” (Biden and Harris, 2023). The Proclamation and accompanying statements by others focused on visual evidence: (1) Till’s damaged head and face in the open coffin as evidence of lynching; (2) the systematic coverup of his brutal murder and mutilation; (3) the revealed character of persons who committed the murder and its coverup—including their exoneration by an all-White, male jury; (4) the resolve of Till-Mobley and the Black Press which risked lawsuits and threats to their businesses for showing the world what happened to Emmett Till, and (5) the outrage voiced by Senator James “Big Jim” Eastland and other elected officials in defense of their segregationist way of life. Eastland was a primary spokesperson (and considered the Godfather of Mississippi) for the White South; he championed the resistance against racial integration, and he often referred to African Americans as an inferior race of people (Annis, Jr, 2016). Addressing the Proclamation, Biden stated to the world and to members of Till’s family:

it’s inspiring to see how many of your family have continued a mother’s courage to find faith in pain, purpose in pain…Insisting on an open caset [sic] — casket for her murdered and, I might add, maimed and mutilated son…The reason the world saw what Mrs. Till-Mobley saw was because of another hero in this story: the Black press. (Applause.) …Jet Magazine, the Chicago Defender, and other newspapers and radio announcers who told the story were unflinching in the bravery with which they told that story, making sure America saw — saw what they saw.

Ida B. Wells once said, quote, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” The way to right wrongs is to shine a light of truth on them.

Well, that’s our charge today. (Biden and Harris, 2023)

Both Biden and Harris made lucid the critical role that pursuing and telling whole-truth plays in clarifying a narrative. Light has been used metaphorically in many English-speaking countries to signify truth. Harris emphasized the broader public policy implications of illuminating racial injustice: “When I served in the United States Senate, I was so profoundly honored to sponsor the Emmett Till Antilynching Act alongside Congressman Bobby Rush. And it was an even greater honor to stand beside our President, Joe Biden, as he signed the law that finally made lynching a federal crime” (Biden and Harris, 2023).

Share the full history; tell the most complete account possible

“Look, telling the truth and the full history of our nation is important. It’s important to our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, to our nation as a whole,” said Joe Biden (Biden and Harris, 2023). Public relations scholars have cautioned against partial or half-truths (see Waymer, 2023). That principle is the essence of what can be called fact agency; any community is weakened, loss of agency, by its inability to agree on and reason from shared facts. Half-truths are dangerous; they can have life or death consequences.

For that reason, nations have witnesses, when providing sworn testimony, pledge to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” It’s the reason severe punishments are associated with perjury, that is lying while under oath. Telling the whole truth or the full history is a critical aspect to clarifying a public memory narrative. Regarding the Till and Till-Mobley Memorial’s import of the event’s whole history, Harris captured the moment:

Our history as a nation is born of tragedy and triumph, of struggle and success. That is who we are. And as people who love our country, as patriots, we know that we must remember and teach our full history, even when it is painful — especially when it is painful.

Today, there are those in our nation who would prefer to erase or even rewrite the ugly parts of our past; those who attempt to teach that enslaved people benefitted from slavery; those who insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, who try to divide our nation with unnecessary debates.

Harris challenged Americans to accept the legacy of those who examine and remember the atrocities committed in the name of community, the nation. Even if it is painful or less than flattering, the whole story must be told. At times powerful voices/actors use public relations of public memory to re-etch and/or clarify a version of the narrative/memory at a particular site or topic. Intentional erasing, blurring to distort facts, or at worst gaslighting should be avoided.

Encourage and challenge publics to avoid selective learning and listening

For many years, social justice advocates have sought to understand, document, and tell the story of the Till lynching as public memory. Concurrently, scholars in multiple disciplines lament the stark societal political polarization that results from social media usage and the echo chambers people experience on these platforms (Cinelli et al., 2021). Too often, people either by choice or by algorithms are fed biased information that aligns with their existing beliefs. What is intriguing about the Till case is that it appears that local, state, and national figures sought to embed misunderstanding and inaccurate facts into public understanding (Till-Mobley, 2004). Recently, political leaders sought to ban books or the teaching of topics (including the history of Emmett Till) that might make White people uncomfortable. Both Harris and Biden spoke to this issue. Harris said:

Let us not be seduced into believing that somehow we will be better if we forget. We will be better if we remember. We will be stronger if we remember.

Because we all here know: It is only by understanding and learning from our past that we can continue to work together to build a better future

Biden made this point firmly:

At a time when there are those who seek to ban books, bury history, we’re making it clear — crystal, crystal clear –(applause) — while darkness and denialism can hide much, they erase nothing. They can hide, but they erase nothing.

We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know. We have to learn what we should know. We should know about our country. We should know everything: the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation. That’s what great nations do, and we are a great nation. That’s what they do. (Biden and Harris, 2023)

Actively combat attempts to blur, misrepresent, or distort

Events in an early morning in the year 1955 on a riverbank in Mississippi, no matter how tragic, can go unnoticed, blur and fade from public memory, and even be erased. In the Till case, a specific, bulletproof historical sign is located at Graball Landing in Mississippi; this location marks the site where Emmett Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River, and it was installed in October 2019 after three previous signs at this location were thrown into the river or vandalized, “riddled with bullets” (Weber, 2019, para 3).

With this context established, organizations such as the United States Government with powerful voices and agency can advocate for social justice or turn away from that moral obligation, and even attempt to thwart or ward off efforts against social justice as former-President Biden attempted to do via his proclamation. Below are the ways Biden, via the Proclamation, attempted to combat efforts to blur, misrepresent, or distort Till’s memory by highlighting the historical significance of these three sites:

Conserving the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse, and Graball Landing will ensure that the historical value of these sites will remain for the benefit of all Americans, providing opportunities to learn about Emmett Till's life and death and the historical and cultural context interwoven with his story. (Biden, 2023, para 22)

Each of these three sites and their historical significance as espoused in the proclamation is discussed below.

Graball Landing

Memorializing where his body was discovered, the Proclamation stated:

Emmett Till suffered a brutal murder. His body was found with barbed wire tied around his neck and attached to a 70-pound cotton gin fan. A 2005 autopsy, prompted by the reopening of the investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, revealed fractures of both of Emmett’s wrists, a fracture of his left femur, multiple fractures of his skull, and a gunshot wound to the head. (Biden, 2023, para 10).

Aspiring to overcome more erasure, the Proclamation states:

Whereas, Graball Landing has long been recognized as the location where Emmett Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River and, more recently, as a memorial site to inform and educate the public about Emmett Till’s murder; and

Whereas, the memorial signs placed at Graball Landing to inform the public about Emmett Till's murder have their own important role in civil rights history, including through their repeated defacement and replacement, and thus are themselves significant cultural and historic objects” (para 24-25)

Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse and the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ

As an attempt to etch this atrocity firmly into public memory, former-President Biden via proclamation highlights the historical significance of the courthouse site:

Whereas, the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse is nationally significant based on its association with the history of Jim Crow, the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, and the site of the Emmett Till murder trial in September 1955; and was designated as a Mississippi Landmark on February 28, 1990, and added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 6, 2007 (Biden, 2023, para 27)

In a similar fashion, Biden highlighted the significance of the church site where the Till family attended and where Till’s funeral service was held:

the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Bronzeville, a historically Black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side…played a prominent role in Chicago's Black community: it was considered the “Mother Church” in Northern Illinois for the influential Church of God in Christ denomination and served as a hub for social, spiritual, and economic activities. The church grew considerably during the Great Migration… Today, the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ still stands as a prominent feature on State Street, as it did in 1955 (Biden, 2023, para 13 & 14)

In sum, the Proclamation drives home the importance of “preserving and interpreting this important history” (Biden, 2023, para, 27). Clarifying, re-etching, and combatting blurring and erasure is paramount: “Conserving these places and the resources they contain will also honor the bravery of Mamie Till-Mobley and other Americans like her who, in the face of unimaginable injustice, have helped lead us toward a more equal and perfect Union” (Biden, 2023, para 22). A management plan created by the Secretary of the Interior is developed to utilize these places for the public good:

The management plan shall ensure that the monument fulfills the following purposes for the benefit of present and future generations: (1) to preserve the historic and cultural resources within the boundaries of the monument; (2) to interpret the story of Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley and its significance to the fight against racism and the dismantling of Jim Crow; and (3) to commemorate the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. (Biden, 2023, para 36)

Ultimately, this memorial is a dedicated network of historical, interpretative, ethical, and creative centers and sites. As previously mentioned, organizations such as the United States Government can choose to act on social justice issues in various ways. However, from a normative standpoint, if organizations are to use public relations to help society to be more fully functioning (Heath, 2006) then they must weigh in on matters of consequence.

In this vein, Coombs and Holladay (2018) challenged the public relations profession: “To qualify as social issues management a firm must speak publicly about its stance toward the social issue and attempt to shape how stakeholders view that stance” (p. 80). The statements that Biden and Harris made as representatives of the United States Government in this instance can qualify as acts of social issues management.

In her remarks during the ceremony, Harris clarified the federal government’s links to social issues management by associating the past atrocities suffered by the Till family to contemporary battles for social justice: “The story of Emmett Till and the incredible bravery of Mamie Till-Mobley helped fuel the movement for civil rights in America, and their stories continue to inspire our collective fight for justice” (Biden and Harris, 2023). In a similar vein, Biden issued a pressing call to action:

For only with truth comes healing, justice, repair, and another step forward toward forming a more perfect union… Hate never goes away. It just hides. It hides under the rocks. And given a little bit of oxygen by bad people, it comes roaring out again.

And it’s up to all of us to deal with that, up to all of us to stop it. Up to all of us. The best way to do that is with the truth. It’s used in a different context, but I think it’s apply — applies here. Silence is complicity. I will not be silent, nor will you be silent about what happened…

There’s really critical work ahead to continue the fight for racial justice and equality for all Americans…. (Biden and Harris, 2023)

Clarifying is a key communication strategy and purpose, in the context of public memory, to combat blurring or erasure attempts, be they duplicitous or otherwise. Taken together, we argue that Biden, Harris, and the National Park Service leveraged critical public memory PR in the form of a PR of Witnessing. Their use of facts, historical records, material sites like the signs and specific locations are all efforts to “shine a light” and confront hard, complex, and at times unflattering histories. We next interrogate President Trump’s executive order regarding American history.

Trump’s executive order as public memory image management and repair

Image Repair Theory (Benoit, 2014, 2017) is an established framework that details strategies organizations and public figures can use when they encounter severe image and reputational threats. Waymer and Hill (2023) provided an important conceptual update to the framework, detailing how sociopolitical issues including issues of race and gender shape and constrain image restoration efforts. Much of the executive order can be read as President Trump’s attempt to defend America’s image, making it great again.

There are several documented accounts of the historical racist and sexist acts that have been committed by or sanctioned by the United States Government against marginalized groups (Doob, 2021; Harriot, 2023) Using a combination of Image Repair strategies, President Trump highlighted how the “remarkable achievements of the United States” (bolstering) and “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” (bolstering) are threatened by the “widespread effort to rewrite history deepens divides and fosters a sense of national shame” (attack the accuser) (The White House, 2025, para. 1). As a means of clarifying what he has labeled as historical blurring, he is using this executive order to:

restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing. (The White House, 2025 para 6).

President Trump ultimately purports to use the executive order to transcend “divisive narratives that distort our shared history” (The White House, 2025, para 6).

Trump’s executive order: Shaping (presented as clarifying) public memory via erasing and blurring

Trump, via the executive order redefines museums:

“Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn” (The White House, 2025, para 6). While this definition seems harmless on its face, Trump later makes it clear that museum learning should be sanitized and free from what he deems as “ideological indoctrination” (para 6). Rather via this executive order, he aims to “restore” museums—mandating that the museums go back to their “rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness…honoring the richness of American history and innovation, and instilling pride in the hearts of all Americans” (para. 7). This will be achieved via erasure primarily. Consider the following:

Lindsey Halligan, Esq., shall work to effectuate the policies of this order through his role on the Smithsonian Board of Regents with respect to the Smithsonian Institution and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo, including by seeking to remove improper ideology from such properties (para 8)

In the same vein, Trump via the executive order empowered the Vice President and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to work with Congress to further erase what he deemed as offensive ideologies. Via the executive order, the aforementioned administrators can

prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy; (para. 9-10)

In addition to commissioning the strategy of erasure, Trump via the executive order empowered the Secretary of the Interior to blur history, that is to strategically obscure. Under executive order, the Secretary of the interior can

take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape (para 19)

This combined action of erasing exhibits that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living” and magnifying American “greatness”, “beauty”, “abundance,” and “grandeur” arguably is not clarifying public memory and history, regardless of whether the executive order is framed as being a clarifying proclamation and policy. The presidential charge to focus on the greatness of the United States is a quintessential example of what public relations scholars have deemed the paradox of the positive (Heath and Waymer, 2009; Johnston et al., 2020; Waymer and Heath, 2021), particularly that of American exceptionalism—which is the myth “that America is uniquely different [better] than other nations in many qualitatively important ways” (p. 639); that America is deemed to be the proverbial “beacon on the hill” (Waymer and Heath, 2016: p. 640).

The paradox of the positive is a critical tool for evaluating communicators’ ability or even propensity to so feature the positive aspects of some matter that they obscure or even ignore negative or less positive aspects of that matter. Rhetorically, “overly positive (or negative) claims stress or frame one perspective beyond the limits of being a fair and true representation of the relevant supporting material” (Heath and Waymer, 2009 p. 200). In this context, the rhetorical paradox suggests that claims and executive orders mandating that the history of American greatness be told can purposefully and even unintendedly bias decisions, policy, and societal decisions in such a way that citizens are not making fully enlightened choices.

Trump’s executive order: Shaping public memory via re-etching strategies

Public memory is a dialectic; organizational actors, in this case government officials, use public relations strategies and tactics—both to shape public policy (issues management) and public sentiment (public memory). Consider the following. An anti-Black, hate crime, church shooting occurred in 2015 in Charleston, SC, USA. Photos released by gunman Dylann Roof (a 21-year-old white supremacist) were widely circulated post-shooting. In some of these pictures, emblems associated with white supremacy such as the Confederate battle flag were readily visible. Since 2015, more than 140 Confederate monuments and memorials have been taken down; more than 90 of those were removed in the wake of George Floyd’s death in May of 2020 (Berkowitz and Blanco, 2021). Most of these monuments were built and erected during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries purportedly to commemorate fallen soldiers; however, this period coincides with the aforementioned Jim Crow era, and many argue that these symbols were used to assert white supremacy and to intimidate Black Americans (Heath and Waymer, 2019). This background is necessary to understand the communicative and policy actions taken by President Trump to “restore” or “re-etch” public memory via this executive order.

In the executive order, The Secretary of the Interior shall:

(i) determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology;

(ii) take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties, as appropriate… (The White House, 2025, para 16-18)

The name of this executive order is “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”; one must ponder, what “truth” is being re-etched and “restored” by calling for the reinstallation of Confederate monuments. One must ponder if identifying and discussing the racist, sexist, and oppressive aspects of America is delusional, which calls for this approach to restoring “sanity.”

Taken together, we argue that President Trump leveraged critical public memory PR in the form of a PR of “sanitizing”; he uses restorative rhetoric and the euphemism of “restoring sanity,” but the actions and affective demand for positivity, glory, triumph, and celebration serve the opposite affect of witnessing or reckoning. One (witnessing) sits with and grapples with the hard truths of a troubled history while the other (sanitizing) could involve avoiding or running away from those truths. To the sympathetic audience, President Trump’s executive order, which leverages the PR of Sanitizing tool works to “clarify”—that is, the executive order can be deemed a corrective response to the alleged currently blurred, distorted image of the United States as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed” (The White House, 2025, para.1).

We argue at worst, that the cleansing/sanitizing/purifying tactics exhibited in Trump’s executive order are extensions of Eurocentrism, and they echo the far-right claims of “replacement” of white Americans and generally reaffirm current exemplars of genocidal politics in American public discourse. At best, we argue these responses are a quintessential example of white fragility—described as any defensive instincts or reactions that a white person experiences when questioned about race or made to consider their own race and its associated privileges or discriminatory acts (historic or contemporary, intentional or unintentional) committed by its members (DiAngelo, 2022; Simonson, 2022). In that vein, the executive order can be read as a defensive, image management oriented, reactive response made on behalf of the United States Government, even though it is purported clarify United States history.

Discussion

In this essay, we have demonstrated that different versions of narratives can and do exist. Critical and interpretive scholars generally oppose the notion of a single, objective Truth; however, to identify and illuminate hegemonic power systems—particularly those that shape public memory—we offer clarifying as an additional process to be added to blurring, erasing, and (re)-etching in the public relations public memory dialectic. We placed the (re) in parentheses before the etching strategy because in a dialectic, some memories may fade over time or in this case are attempted to be erased actively. In that same vein, memories can be re-blurred or attempted to be re-erased. Regardless of what “side” one falls politically, there will be organizational actors likely who will engage in a “re-etching” process—a contest over public narratives. In this way, we have advanced this body of literature by grappling directly with the political nature of the public relations battles over public memory. As such, in addition to providing a new analysis and classification strategy (clarification), we have offered a more robust tool for discussing, analyzing, and interrogating the deeply rooted power systems that drive the highest levels of societal public memory debate.

Additionally, we offer PR of Witnessing and PR of Sanitizing as modifiers of the PR tools of clarifying and re-etching; they serve as a set of contexts and rhetorical clues that scholars, critics, and practitioners alike can use to sense the distinction between re-etching and clarifying efforts that are aimed to reckon with or cleanse public memory.

Furthermore, as we have wrestled with the political and at times polarizing nature of public memory narratives, we have shown how a clash of narratives demonstrates that blurring, erasure, and etching recur at crucial moments in the search for social justice based on issues of identity, identification, fact, policies, place, and moral values. In such matters, critical analysis must strive to understand and oppose injustice which tends to obscure and hide. Additionally, identifying these crucial moments is a “way to know” who is saying what and why, and attention to context is a skill we can teach and use to cultivate critical thinking in audiences. Effort must be eternally made to shed light on key events. To that end, we argue that clarifying as a strategy must be used to unmask lies, half-truths, or blurring whether well-intentioned or duplicitous.

A central theme to this analysis is this: How public memories are defined and supported by facts explains the ability of society and community to manage public policy, especially social justice. The United States Government, via the words and actions of Biden and Harris, established this three-part Till and Till-Mobley Memorial to counter the narrative of racist blurring and erasure that was taking place in the United States. President Trump in 2025 via executive order sought to counter the actions taken during the Biden and Harris administration. This dialectic proves that “clarifying” and “re-etching” are critical to the public memory dialectic process in communication and public relations, regardless of whether these actions taken can be labeled as partisan responses or not. Narratives and counternarratives become interpretative and motivational frames that operationalize events, policies, and responses, and thereby constitute community.

To clarify public memory and history is the objective of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument. Even though President Trump claims that his executive order was intended to clarify history and combat divisive ideology, our analysis reveals that his policy actions suffer the paradox of the positive and are used as image repair—to paint the United States in a favorable, glorious light. In the words of Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr who campaigned for nearly 70 years to champion the life, death, and social justice cause of his cousin, Emmett Till, “It has been quite a journey for me from the darkness to the light” (Biden and Harris, 2023). And what issues management tells us, is that such clarifying and re-etching efforts will need to occur periodically, as social justice issues are likely to be contested and recontested with each passing generation.