To those of you who have called or emailed me since news went public about the controversy and criminal activities at Burr Oak Cemetery:

The Scandal

On July 9, 2009, a story broke in Chicago, Illinois that four employees at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip had been arrested and charged with digging up bodies, dumping them in a hidden area of the cemetery, reselling the graves to unsuspecting families of newly deceased individuals, and pocketing the money. In addition to the disrespect to the dead and heartbreak of the families of the deceased that this terrible scam has caused and is causing, apparently affecting at least 300 disinterred bodies, those behind the scam have also pocketed an estimated $300,000 in moneys taken in from those illegally and deceptively sold graves. It is also believed that donations made to the proposed Emmett Till Historical Museum have also been embezzled.

The Emmett Till Historical Museum Project

In light of the current investigation at Burr Oak Cemetery, I have taken down a page on this website that had, since October 2004, served as an advertisement for donations to this museum, which started out as a worthy cause backed by Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. As far as I know, my site was the only online source to mention this proposed museum.

I was told about this project by Mrs. Mobley sometime in 2002 during one of my many conversations with her. I had been working with her since 1996 to try to raise funds to move Emmett’s body to the Oak Woods Cemetery, where several prominent black figures, including Chicago mayor Harold Washington, are buried. Several years into this effort, Mrs. Mobley told me that officials at Burr Oak had approached her and said that they wanted to keep Emmett’s remains buried there, and that they would build a museum where the body could be interred within. They said they would also like to eventually have Mrs. Mobley’s remains housed there as well, along with her husband, Gene Mobley, who died in 2000.

Mrs. Mobley died in January 2003 before this project really even got off the ground. Later that year I talked to Carolyn Towns by telephone and she gave me more information about the proposed project at Burr Oak. When I put together my website in the Fall of 2004, I asked her if I could put up a link about the museum which would include an address and phone number where people could make donations or inquire further. Ms. Towns faxed me a brochure about the museum, which included an artist’s drawing of the proposed building. After I put that information up on my site, I contacted Ms. Towns a few more times by phone from 2004 to 2006, and she always assured me that a groundbreaking ceremony was only a few months away. I never questioned her honesty, for I assumed that funds were slow in coming in and that this was the reason behind the many delays. I had nothing to do with the project other than placing this link on my site, and I never did update that particular page. No donations were ever sent to me personally, nor did I have anything at all to do with raising funds, outside of the link on my website, which referred people to the cemetery and to Ms. Towns.

The Original Casket

My last contact with Ms. Towns was in February 2007 during my first trip to Alsip and to the Burr Oak Cemetery. Both she and Mr. Nicks were very helpful to me that day. There was a blizzard occurring at the moment I was there, but I wanted to see Emmett Till’s grave, and Mr. Nicks had me sit in my car to keep warm until he could find the grave, covered with ice and the falling snow. He took a pick ax and chopped ice until he found the grave for me, which I thought was a very kind thing to do.

I knew that after Emmett Till’s body had been exhumed two years earlier for an autopsy, as part of the FBI’s 2004-2006 investigation into the Till case, that it was reburied in a new casket, and that the old one was probably in storage there. Ms. Towns confirmed this to me, and she said that they were going to display it in the museum once it opened. I asked if I could see it, and Mr. Nicks took me to the storage building behind the office, removed a green canvas that had been covering it, opened it, and let me take photos and stay unsupervised in the shed for as long as I desired. I posted several of those photos of the casket on my website, and here include all of those taken by me that day. The casket had rust on the outside, on the glass under the lid, and the fabric inside had decayed somewhat, which I assumed was natural after being in the ground for 50 years. It seemed to me that covering the casket with canvas in the shed was an appropriate way to store it at the time, and I did not question how well officials at the cemetery were taking care of it then. News reports since July 9, 2009, commenting on the condition of the casket say it was “discovered” in this shed after the scandal broke, but I had known it was there for over two years and noted that fact along with the pictures on my website. Ms. Towns did not speak of the casket like it was a hidden secret, or that it was being neglected, and I had assumed that its whereabouts was common knowledge to anyone in the Till family. Photos taken of the casket that appeared in the papers after the scandal broke do look as if it has deteriorated much more since I saw it. There was no wildlife living in it in 2007, nor was there any evidence that there had been. The day after I took the pictures, I showed them to Simeon Wright and Wheeler Parker, cousins of Emmett Till, during my interview with them for my book. I told them the casket was in storage in a shed on the cemetery grounds, which they could see from the photos. At the time, neither they, nor I, had any reason to believe that the casket was being neglected. At that point, the casket would have been in storage for almost two years.

Since the scandal broke on July 9, 2009, some people have asked me in emails and phone calls why I did not report Emmett Till’s stored casket to the authorities in 2007, but these people have assumed that Till was still in this casket, and was one of the bodies illegally exhumed as part of the cemetery scam headed by Ms. Towns, Mr. Nicks, and two others. My comments on my website, and those of recent news reports have been clear that Emmett had been reburied in a different casket in 2005, and that the stored one was empty.

Since this scandal broke, the Till family has agreed to donate the casket to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where it will undergo restoration and be on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. All four of those charged in the cemetery scandal have been released on bail, Carolyn Towns, the last to be released, went home on October 22, 2009.