The whole reason Emmett Till was sent by his mother from Chicago to Mississippi was that Emmett Till was an out of control colored boy...And the whole reason he got killed was for being an asshole and whistling at a white woman in the South... Maybe these pandering newspapers should start do news stories about all the WHITE men, women and children being killed TODAY by so many BLACK OFFENDERS who never even as much whistled at anybody!! As far as I am concerned, piss on Emmett Till's grave!
While sorting through old records in the Burr Oak Cemetery office, employees found a handful of old brochures asking for donations to the “Emmett Till Historical Museum and Mausoleum.”Former manager Carolyn Towns, sentenced Friday to 12 years in prison for dismembering a corpse and theft, wanted to build a museum on the grounds where Emmett Till and his mother Mamie Till Mobley are buried that would honor his legacy.
That’s what she promised Mrs. Mobley.
“We have so much history here, and we want to highlight all the prominent African-Americans buried at the cemetery,” Towns said in 2004. “We’re very excited about it.”
But Towns’ arrest two years ago halted any plans she made to build a museum for Till and his mother in the historic black cemetery near Alsip.
And no one since in Till’s hometown — where the teen was raised and buried, where his mother put her child’s mutilated face on display for the world to see — has publicly discussed any kind of memorial.
Little now acknowledges the Chicago son whose lynching in Mississippi sparked the national Civil Rights movement.
His grave remains untouched in the middle of the cemetery, covered by a flat copper plate. A little stretch of 71st Street at South St. Lawrence Street in Chicago and his former elementary school are named for him.
“It is a sad commentary that this is his hometown,” said Till’s cousin, Simeon Wright, who was with him in August 1955 when he whistled, and when he was taken away. “Even in the place that he was killed, they’re building a memorial to him.”
Tallahatchie County, Miss., is restoring the courthouse where an all-white jury acquitted two white men of the murder of the black Chicago teen. Local authorities have tried to buy and preserve the store in Money, Miss., where Till whistled at a white woman, the crime that cost him his life.
The Emmett Till Memorial Commission of Tallahatchie County mapped out a driving tour brochure of more than a dozen sites from the Till case. And the state renamed a prominent 38-mile stretch of U.S. highway from Tutwiler to Greenwood in honor of Till.
It’s very progressive of Mississippi to commemorate its past transgressions, said Joy Bivins, a curator at the Chicago History Museum and a force behind the museum’s recent photography exhibit about lynching in America called “Without Sanctuary.”
“Then it really lets people know you haven’t forgotten,” she said.
So here, she said, his family’s homes in Summit Argo and the West Woodlawn community should be added to neighborhood tours or marked. The only Till site on the local historical registry is Roberts Temple Church of God, where his body was viewed by thousands.
Till matters nationally, she said, because he showed the rest of the country the legacy of racial violence Southern black families had been dealing with for decades.
“Emmett Till kind of represents that legacy of Chicago being a place where people find refuge, if you think of his family coming here to escape the racism and degradation of the Jim Crow South,” she said.
And it was his mother who made the rest of America look to her son’s battered body to see what was happening in the South.
She wanted his story remembered, said Keith Beauchamp, the filmmaker who with Mobley’s blessing, made the documentary “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till” that got the FBI to reopen Till’s murder case in 2004.
“She really wanted a mausoleum and a museum,” Beauchamp said. “She really hoped, because she had all the plans, how they were going to build it.”
“She really wanted something to recognize the legacy of her son in history.”
It wasn’t clear during the sheriff’s investigation at the cemetery how much money Towns ever collected for any Emmett Till memorial. No account records or cancelled checks were found, the sheriff’s office said, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request. Towns has not spoken to reporters since her arrest.
Till’s glass-topped casket entrusted to her was found in a shed, hosting a family of possums.
The casket was sent, at his family’s request, to Washington, D.C., to await the opening of the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Wright said.
“It’s in good hands now,” Wright said.
Burr Oak will eventually have some sort of memorial, mandated by its bankruptcy plan and funded with $50,000 from an insurance settlement, to honor everyone buried there. So far, no one has said anything about Till.
Trustee Patricia Brown Holmes will consult community members on what to build, and she thinks it’s essential for visitors to find the graves of historical figures buried at Burr Oak: Jazz singer Dinah Washington, a slew of Negro league baseball players and Till and his mother.
“But making a big deal out of it as far as a big monument and a big tribute, I think that moment may have passed,” she said.
Her teenaged children and their friends just don’t care about race as much as their parents do.
“What you start to realize is that the younger generation is where we’ve been trying to get to: They mix together,” Holmes said. “So when you start to focus in on Emmett Till, they don’t get it, and the question you ask is, ‘Is that good or bad?’
“And on some levels, which I think are becoming higher and higher levels, that’s good.”
