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Emmett Till’s Home Gains Landmark Status
Preserving the truth of our difficult past is our collective job
Emmett Till’s childhood home is remarkable in its regularity. It’s a two story building on Chicago’s South Side—really more like Chicago’s South East Side, not too far from Lake Michigan. It’s brick, like most Chi-Town homes, and it is situated in a neighborhood that back in the day was known for its community and verve. When Till was murdered after a White woman accused him of whistling at her, grabbing her, and putting his arms around her—when Bobo, as everyone called him back then, never came home—that whole neighborhood, and then the whole nation, grieved.
His murder — and his mother’s, Mamie Till-Mobley’s, subsequent decision to have his funeral services with an open casket — added an explosive momentum to the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of Till’s drowning, and that moment became a bookmark in a long lineage of saying their names — the people who die at the hands of White supremacist systems.
Till’s burnished red house is now an historical landmark. Finally. As of this week, the Chicago City Council voted to grant that…
