From June 2005 until July 2009, the casket that had contained the body of Emmett Till for half a century sat empty and covered in a storage shed behind the office at Burr Oak Cemetery.
From the mid-1990s until her death in 2003, Mamie Till-Mobley had become increasingly dissatisfied with the condition of Burr Oak and the upkeep of Emmett’s grave in particular. The grounds, equipment, and offices had suffered from years of neglect; things became so bad that even the clientele became suspect, and office members interacted with customers behind bulletproof glass.1
During my first conversation with Mamie Till-Mobley in December 1996, she told me that she had established an Emmett Till Memorial Fund to raise the necessary monies for removing Emmett’s remains from Burr Oak and transferring them to the beautifully maintained Oak Woods Cemetery. She also wanted to erect a monument at the new gravesite that would honor her son and those who died in the civil rights struggle. I asked if anyone was helping her in this endeavor, and, to my surprise, she informed me that she was doing it alone. I enthusiastically offered my assistance, and she readily accepted. As I began creating and sending out flyers, the Deseret News in Salt Lake City ran an article about Emmett Till, and highlighted my efforts to raise money for the reburial and monument.2 Donations trickled in, but they were few and far between. Four years later, we were still trying when Mamie faxed me a letter to preface my upcoming remarks at a local school where I hoped to solicit student help with the project. It is clear from her message to the students how much the grave removal meant to her:
Emmett’s grave is located above a sewer. Apparently, the pipes burst in winter, flooding his grave site to a depth of 4 to 8 inches. Even in the spring, it is soggy and wet. In addition, the mowers have broken up his headstone until the picture has been smashed and fallen out, the vase which recesses into the headstone will no longer stand up. It’s a mess! Personally, I am so depressed when I visit that it takes me days to recover. . . . If I don’t get the job done with the help of you and Mr. Anderson, I can predict that it will never come to pass.3
Sometime the following year, Mamie told me that there had been a sudden change in plans. She decided to end the efforts to remove her son to Oak Woods because the new management at Burr Oak offered to raise funds to build a facility on the grounds, to be called the Emmett Till Historical Museum. This seemed like an ideal solution and relieved her and me of the burden of raising the money ourselves; indeed, Mamie seemed satisfied with the change of plans. A company called Perpetua Holdings of Illinois had just taken over the neglected property in July 2001. Slivy Edmunds Cotton, president of Perpetua, committed to make all of the improvements necessary to restore the 150-acre cemetery to its former self. Since 1927, Burr Oak had been an important presence to the black community as one of the first places black families could bury their dead. It had served the growing population of African Americans who had been part of the Great Migration following World War I.4
Plans also began taking shape to build a mausoleum within the proposed museum that would hold the bodies of Emmett Till, Gene Mobley, and, one day, Mamie Till-Mobley. The museum would not only tell the story of Emmett but of other African Americans who made a difference in Chicago and elsewhere.5
Mamie Till-Mobley did not live to see the facility that was to honor her son come to be, but after her death, plans for the project appeared to remain intact. The cemetery produced a flyer announcing that ground-breaking ceremonies would take place in the spring of 2005.6 Yet when Emmett’s body was exhumed for an autopsy in June of that year, there had as yet been no activity on the project. Till’s remains were returned to the ground with the idea that they would once again be unearthed. The day I stood before Till’s decaying casket in February 2007, cemetery manager Carolyn Towns assured me that the museum was still a priority and that the coffin would become part of a permanent exhibit.
Nearly two-and-a-half years later, on July 9, 2009, news broke that Carolyn Towns, then forty-nine, and coworkers Maurice Dailey, fifty-nine, Keith Nicks, forty-five, and Terrance Nicks, thirty-eight, had been arrested and charged with dismembering human remains, a Class X felony. Additional charges filed against Towns alleged that a large number of graves had been excavated and the bodies buried or dumped into a vacant part of the cemetery. Towns then allegedly sold the emptied graves to the families of newly deceased individuals and kept the money, which officials estimated to be over $200,000. At the same time, she destroyed all the paperwork relating to the original graves. Authorities believed that over 300 graves were affected.7
The scheme came to a halt when Willie Esper, a twenty-eight-year-old gravedigger practicing with a backhoe, began inadvertently excavating bones in what was supposed to be an unused section of the cemetery. After Esper made the discovery, another employee told him to keep quiet or else he would lose his job. Esper kept talking, however, and a co-worker who overheard his story went to the authorities.8
As the case unfolded, anxieties that Emmett Till may have been one of the discarded bodies were quickly alleviated. However, authorities began investigating the fund set up for the Emmett Till Historical Museum, which had never gotten off the ground. They also learned that the casket in the storage shed had been neglected and was deteriorating further. In fact, when they first discovered it, a family of possums apparently living inside the shed ran out and scurried away. These revelations were devastating to Till family members and others who believed the casket was being cared for. Rev. Jesse Jackson noted upon hearing news of the scandal that the casket “is as much a part of the civil-rights movement as the bus that Rosa Parks was riding on.”9 That bus sits prominently at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
On August 26, news outlets announced that the Till family had taken possession of the casket and had made arrangements to donate it to the Smithsonian Institution, where it would go on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, targeted to open in 2015 (since moved to 2016). Restoration work on the casket was to take place at A. A. Rayner & Sons Funeral Home, where Till’s body had been prepared for burial in 1955. On Friday, August 28, the fifty-fourth anniversary of Emmett Till’s death, family members gathered at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, where Emmett’s funeral service had taken place in September 1955, and made the official announcement. Afterward, they marched across the Emmett Till Memorial Bridge and released white balloons into the air in a symbolic gesture of freedom.10
On July 8, 2011, almost two years from the day when the Burr Oak scandal first broke, fifty-one-year-old Carolyn Towns pleaded guilty to several charges related to her grave-selling scheme and was convicted of stealing over $100,000 from Perpetua. Sentenced to twelve years in prison, she was granted a few months to make arrangements for the care of her elderly mother, after which she began serving her sentence on November 1. The cases involving her co-conspirators are currently pending.11
On February 22, 2012, President Barack Obama, former First Lady Laura Bush, Congressman John Lewis, Washington mayor Vincent Gray, and others gathered for a ground-breaking ceremony for what would be the nineteenth Smithsonian museum. The site, located on the National Mall between the Washington Monument and the National Museum of American History, sits near what had once been the largest slave market in the nation. President George W. Bush had signed the law creating the museum back in 2003. It was projected to cost $500 million, half of which would be appropriated by Congress. When finished, it would contain seven levels, totaling 323,000 square feet.12
Mamie Till-Mobley’s death spared her of what would have been another heartbreaking development and final disappointment. She had placed her trust in Carolyn Towns, who promised to honor Emmett Till. Unbeknownst to Till-Mobley, she had put that trust into the hands of a criminal. Burr Oak’s reputation became deeply and possibly irreversibly tarnished as a result of the scheme masterminded by Towns. Emmett Till’s body, however, remains there to this day. In August 2014, a monument honoring those whose graves were desecrated was dedicated by Illinois governor Pat Quinn and Cook County sheriff Tom Dart.13
Although the Emmett Till Historical Museum that Mamie Till-Mobley died anticipating never came to fruition, there was an unexpected triumph. The casket’s place in the Smithsonian only came about because of a scandal, yet it will fully cement Emmett Till’s role in the civil rights struggle in a way never imagined and that will tell his story to millions who otherwise would have never learned of it. Countless others will become one with those who filed past this same coffin in 1955, as I did in a dimly lit cold shed in February 2007. It will preserve in a new, dignified setting the images that aroused not only a nation, but a world.
The restoration work will make the glass top clear once again so that visitors can look down and see where a tortured body once lay, a vision that was denied to me because time had darkened the original glass. Seeing clearly now, both figuratively and literally, millions will understand and be forever changed by the stories, not only of Emmett Till but of countless others, on what will forever be hallowed ground.