Emmett Till’s home gains landmark status and will turn into museum

The South Side home of Emmett Till has formally gained Chicago landmark status and will be turned into a museum by a local non-profit that bought the structure in 2019.

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The city council announced on Wednesday that it had granted the 125-year Woodlawn home, which had fallen into disrepair, official landmark designation after it was granted preliminary approval in September.

“Till’s death became a rallying cry for the civil rights movement,” the city of Chicago said in a statement on Wednesday of the murder of the 14-year-old after he was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, becoming a spark in the civil rights movement.

Mamie Till-Mobley, Till’s mother, chose an open-casket funeral at a local church for him and gave permission for Black members of the press to photograph his tortured body, fueling what became a generation of civil rights activists.

“I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till,” Till-Mobley said at the time. She died in Chicago in 2003 aged 81.

Two white men were later acquitted on murder charges, and a grand jury refused to indict them on kidnapping charges.

The white woman who accused him is now known as Carolyn Donham. In 2017, she confirmed that she had lied about Till’s conduct. Her statement directly contradicted her testimony decades before, when she told a jury that Emmett had grabbed her waist and said crude things to her.

Till had moved to Chicago with his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, and her husband when he was 10 years old. The city noted in its press release that “Mamie Till-Mobley continued to live in a three-bedroom apartment on the home’s second floor until 1962” while working to “eradicat[e] racism and improv[e] the quality of life for people of color”.

On the 65th anniversary of his murder, 28 August, thousands of people rallied in Washington DC to demand policing and voting rights reforms.

“Before there was Trayvon Martin, before there was Eric Garner, there was Emmett Till,” Jeanette Taylor, alderman, said shortly after the council voted to approve the ordinance designation.

“We still have a real problem in this country of not addressing the brutality that has happened to Black folks, but also making sure we apologize and recognize it and do things to move forward. I’m excited the Emmett Till home is going to be preserved.”

Till’s 2,400 sq ft home, located in the Woodlawn community, was constructed in 1895. The designation protects the structure from demolition of any major renovations that would alter its facade. Blacks in Green, a local non-profit that purchased the home last year, announced it had planned to turn it into a heritage site.

At the time, founder Naomi Davis wrote on Facebook that the non-profit would transform the home “into an international heritage pilgrimage destination” that celebrates a “story of courage, fortitude, creativity, labor and love that built our great American cities”.

“Achieving landmark status for the Till-Mobley House is an important step in recognizing that Black cultural heritage sites long overlooked by the city are a vital part of Chicago’s past, present and future,” she told the Sun-Times.

“Emmett Till’s tragic murder is a part of Chicago and America’s Great Migration story that needs to be remembered and retold for generations to come,” she added.

The Society of Architectural Historians Heritage Conservation Committee released a letter in support of the landmark designation, pointing out the home would be one of few physical places in the era of Till’s murder that still stand.