As we prepare to move into Black History Month, Chicago City Council voted to officially designate the historic Emmett Till residence in the city’s Woodlawn neighborhood, as a landmark that will be converted into a museum.
In September, the home was granted preliminary landmark status by the council.
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The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House, located at 6427 S. St. Lawrence Ave., was the home of the 14-year-old killed by white supremacists in Mississippi, 66 years ago. In August 1955, Till visited his family in Money, where he was shot in the head and lynched after being accused of offending a white woman.
Two men were later acquitted on murder charges. In 2017, Carolyn Bryant Donham told a historian that she lied about the incident.
Till’s mother displayed her son’s brutalized body at an open-casket funeral in Bronzeville, which served as a pivotal moment for the Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and the ’60s.
He lived on the second floor with his mother, while his uncle and cousins live on the first floor.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js“Up to this point, we haven’t done Emmett’s memory and sacrifice enough,” said Naomi Davis of @BlacksInGreen, which is developing an $11 million museum, theater and programs on the site. https://t.co/XuePGTKWKa
— Dennis Rodkin (@Dennis_Rodkin) January 27, 2021
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Landmark status ensures the brick two-flat facade and roofline will not be altered without approval from the city’s landmarks commission.
The landmark status honors “the history of the murder that became a movement and is now becoming a museum, so that we can make sure that our generations to come to understand the greatness of the Great Migration strivers who moved North into these cities,” Naomi Davis, founder and CEO of Blacks in Green told the Book Club Chicago.
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