A Mother’s Love

Emmett Till was murdered at the age of 14 in 1955 while visiting family in Mississippi.  Emmett was accused of whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, working in her husband’s store.  Soon after, the woman’s husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother John William Milam forcibly entered the home of Emmett’s uncle in the middle of the night while armed.  The men kidnapped Emmett and beat, tortured, and murdered him.  His bloated body was soon discovered in the Tallahatchie River.  At trial, the two men were acquitted of Emmett’s murder by an all-white jury.  Protected under the doctrine of double jeopardy, Roy Bryant and John William Milam later confessed to Emmett Till’s murder in interviews with Look magazine.  The confessions were detailed by the magazine in an article titled The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi published on January 24, 1956.

Emmett’s body was returned home to his mother in the Chicagoland area for burial.  Her decision to have an open casket served as a watershed moment for the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.  Thousands came to view Emmett’s brutalized body which became a symbol of the utter viciousness of racial violence in America.

Reading Mamie Till-Mobley’s book, I understood that the Burr Oak Cemetery she wrote about was located just outside Chicago.  A reasonable drive from America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, WI.  I was disappointed that I wasn’t already aware of the mausoleum and museum she described, especially since I was reading her book almost 20 years after both its publication and her death.  I began looking into Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, IL, and that is when I learned the heartbreaking and disturbing legacy of Burr Oak Cemetery.

Burr Oak Cemetery has a long history as a Black cemetery.  It was established in 1927, and many distinguished and famous Black Americans have been buried there.  Those buried in Burr Oak include notable athletes, musicians, singers, song writers, religious and civil rights leaders, businessmen and women, educators, attorneys, and many others.  It is of course also the final resting place of Emmett Till, his mother, and Gene Mobley who married Emmett’s mother after Emmett’s death.

In July 2009, approximately 6 years after Mamie Till-Mobley’s death, Burr Oak Cemetery made local and national news due to a law enforcement investigation into a grave robbing scheme at Burr Oak.  In the end, four cemetery workers were arrested and later convicted for their roles in the scam.  The crimes involved digging up the bodies of people previously buried at the cemetery.  Their remains were then unceremoniously discarded elsewhere on the cemetery property.  Then the newly empty plots were re-sold for a profit.  Carolyn Towns, a manager at the property received a prison sentence of 12 years.  Maurice Dailey, a backhoe operator, received a probation term of 3 years.  A foreman named Keith Nicks received a prison sentence of 6 years.  The fourth cemetery worker, Terrence Nicks, received a prison term of 3 years.

ABC News covered the early developing story at the time with this news report.

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