In 1923, Wiley Carthan left Mississippi on the Illinois Central Railroad, heading for Chicago. He settled just outside the Chicago city limits in the town of Argo, Illinois. Argo’s real name was Summit, but the largest corn processing plant in the world—the maker of Karo syrup, Bosco malted milk, Mazola cooking oil, and, critically, Argo Corn Starch—made Summit a company town, and locals called the place Argo. Carthan settled in and sent for his wife Alma and daughter Mamie, and the family made a life there. Mamie Carthan graduated with honors from the high school and soon married another Argo worker, Louis Till. In 1941, they had a son named Emmett.

The Argo plant shaped every facet of life in Summit. If locals called the town “Argo,” they called Argo the “university”—it was the place where boys went after high school. Emmett’s father, his stepfather, and many members of the Till family punched the clock at Argo.

Historians use the phrase “The Great Migration” to describe the early years of African American exodus out of the South to cities in the North. Of course, that movement really started with the underground railroad and continued through the rest of the 19th century. But the first mass migration came in the era of World War I and into the 1920s. For example, Chicago’s blacks made up 2% of the city’s population in 1910, 7% by 1930, and 25% by 1960.

Southern Jim Crow laws were firmly in place by 1900, depriving African Americans of the rights of citizens—voting, equal justice under law, trial by jury, etc. Few Southern blacks managed to acquire property, so share-cropping and tenancy kept most in penury. Schools, accommodations, transportation, and housing were all rigidly segregated, and black life was hedged in by a vicious system that enforced laws against vagrancy and other crimes with long sentences and brutal labor. And too, the lynching of blacks who “got out of line” added an element of terror to the indignities of Jim Crow.

Faced with such conditions, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Isabel Wilkerson has written that “nearly every black family in America had a decision to make.” And scores upon scores did “what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.” The Carthans joined the throng of what was, in Wilkerson's words, a “back-against-the wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better.”

The World War I economy and the prosperity of the 1920s created new opportunities in the urban North. Word of these opportunities spread on the growing popularity of the Chicago Defender, a weekly newspaper with national circulation that repeatedly urged Southern blacks to leave their benighted homeland. The same railroad that carried Till to and from Mississippi carried the Defender to the rural South, bearing news of a brighter day in Chicago.

Equally important, African Americans voiced their resentment of American apartheid. The founding of the NAACP in 1909, for example, was a key moment of black politicization and resistance. The growing political resistance combined with industrial opportunities in the North lured the dispossessed to Chicago by the hundreds of thousands.

Corn Products made Argo a small boom town, attracting not only Southern blacks, but Poles, Slovaks, Russians, and Italians. African Americans got the worst jobs, but the work was steady, and the town prosperous enough to sustain a life far better than anything in Mississippi. Blacks founded their own churches, businesses, and neighborhoods. Like the town itself, Corn Products was not fully integrated but not rigidly segregated either, offering a margin of decency. Life got even better for workers when the union organized Corn Products in the late 1930s. The Argo Local of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union brought better pay, benefits, overtime, and if not equality, at least a measure of dignity and security.

Before Till took the train to Mississippi in 1955, his family had its trials: Wiley Carthan left for Detroit, Louis Till abused his wife. But the modest prosperity provided by Corn Products made Till's hometown a more safe and secure environment than he might have experienced in Mississippi or on Chicago’s South Side.

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On July 25, 2021, this site became a memorial. To participate in the memorial, and help fund the education of underpriviledged youth, contribute to the field of memorial bricks here. 

We usually think of Emmett Till as a Chicagoan. He did live on the segregated South Side during his last few years, but most of his life was spent in Summit, Illinois, a tight-knit industrial community of 12,000 people just outside of Chicago.

On July 25, 1941, Emmett was born in Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Although his first home was a nearby Summit apartment, he moved to this lot (7526 64th Street) with his mother Mamie Till before the year was out. In 1947, Till’s cousin Wheeler Parker arrived from Mississippi and moved in next door (7524 64th Street). Till's first school was just a block west.

These were happy years. In her memoir, Mamie Till-Mobley spoke warmly of Summit, remembering, “Our whole neighborhood was like an extended family.” She described how African Americans had a strong sense of community centered around church, work, and family. Emmett, along with his best friend Wheeler, explored every bit of this community on foot and by bicycle. Even after Emmett and his mother moved to Chicago in 1950, he returned to Argo most weekends to see his friends and extended family.

Summit may have offered a tight-knit community, but it was also an industrial town. In fact, the southern half of the town was known by locals as “Argo,” the eponymous name of the company that owned the world’s largest corn processing plant. Just west of Archer St., the 30-acre plant produced Argo Corn Starch and shaped virtually every facet of life in Summit. As Mamie recalled, “Every day, the people in our little Argo community could see the Corn Products plant spread out there on the horizon, dominating our landscape. It stood there as a constant reminder that the gateway to a better life was hard work.”

During the World War I era and into the 1920s, the Argo plant was indeed a gateway. It attracted thousands of African Americans determined to escape the Jim Crow South. Argo (both the town and the company) offered jobs, schools, and neighborhoods that were not rigidly segregated. Although the streets north of 63rd were red-lined and closed to African Americans, 64th Street was integrated. To be sure, Argo was no racial paradise. But compared to the Deep South from which most migrants came, it was a big step up. The plant employed black laborers in the most dangerous and difficult roles, but they offered steady hours and decent pay. In the 1930s, the plant was unionized, and laborers enjoyed better protections still. Opportunities to vote, hold property, and educate children were far superior to what lay behind in the South. Even the local sports teams had black and white players.

After a short-lived adventure in Detroit, Mamie Till-Bradley, her new husband Pink Bradley, and the ten-year old Emmett left Argo for Chicago’s South Side in 1951. With a job downtown, Till-Bradley moved to 63rd Street and St. Lawrence, in a densely packed and rigidly segregated neighborhood near her son’s school. But Argo, more than Chicago, still felt like home. Emmett took the 63d Street streetcar back week after week, and his mother never worried about him there: “I knew he was in good hands. I knew the entire community was looking out for him. . . . Argo was a good fit for Emmett. . . . He would hang out with his friends all day on Saturdays and spend a good part of Sundays in Church, where, of course, he’d find his friends again. He lived for the fellowship. He lived for the fun. That most of all.”

Argo is still a home for Emmett. In 2009, under the leadership of Dr. Marvel Parker and Rev. Wheeler Parker, the home base of the Summit Community Task Force became the Emmett Till Memorial Center. Located a short block from here, at 6450 S. 76th Avenue, the building provides space for a range of community and justice-oriented activities.

On July 25, 2021, on Emmett Till's 80th birthday, the Task Force unveiled a commemorative sign and a field of commemorative bricks. Donors can buy the bricks to to support the Emmett Till Scholarship Fund.

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In November 1951, ten-year old Emmett, his mother Mamie Till-Bradley, and her new husband Pink Bradley moved into a two-flat home in the Woodlawn neighborhood on the south side of Chicago.

Less than two years earlier, Mrs. Till and Emmett had left their comfortable community in Argo for an adventure in Detroit. As Mrs. Till-Mobley (her final married name) tells the story in The Death of Innocence, she went to Detroit looking for love. She found Pink Bradley and married him in May of 1951. But Emmett never took to Detroit. He longed for the friends and family he left behind in Summit. By the time of the wedding, Emmett had moved back to the Chicago area on his own and was living with John Carthan, the younger brother of his grandfather Wiley Carthan. Till-Bradley had no interest in being so far away from her son. When her mother Alma Spearman purchased the two-flat home at 6427 S. St. Lawrence Street, she resigned her Detroit-area job and returned to Chicago to work as an Air Force clerk just south of the Loop.

Emmett, his mother, and, for a couple of months, Pink, lived on the three-bedroom second floor. Ollie Gordon lived in the garden apartment and an uncle lived on the first floor. Although the marriage to Pink was over by the end of 1952, the S. St. Lawrence Street home was good to her and Emmett. Just after moving in, Emmett began 5th grade at McCosh elementary school, an all-black school just a 5-minute walk from his home.

As Till-Mobley recalled, “Emmett controlled 64th and St. Lawrence. For a three-block stretch, this was his land. He knew every old person. He did grocery errands. He did lawns. He (shoveled) snow. He made $15 washing and painting a ladies’ hall, from the lower molding down to the floor.” 64th and St. Lawrence may have been Emmett’s “land,” but his heart was never totally in it. On weekends, Till would ride the 63rd-street street car back to the friendly confines of Argo. There he would find his cousin Wheeler and the friends with whom he spent his first nine years.

Till’s last journey from S. St. Lawrence Street was on the morning of August 20, 1955. He caught the 8:01am train at Englewood Station, barely two blocks from his house. The train was bound for the Mississippi Delta where Till would become the victim of one of America’s most ruthless lynchings.

In 2015, the home was bought by Alex Al-Sabah of Elite Invest for $47,500. Elite Invest evicted squatters and flipped the house, quickly selling it for $175,000 to a New Jersey investor named Brahmananda Bandela. Neither Al-Sabah nor Bandela were aware of the home’s history. In 2017, Preservation Chicago advocated that the home should be given Chicago Landmark status--a benchmark achieved in 2021. 

In 2020, the home was purchased by Blacks in Green--an environmental and community revitalization nonprofit. With funding from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, they plan to open it as a community space in 2025. 

While the home has never been commemorated, McCosh Elementary has fared better. Till attended McCosh Elementary from 1951 to 1955 (grades 5-8). In 2006, McCosh Elementary was renamed the Emmett Louis Till Math and Science Academy. Located at 6543 South Champlain Avenue, the school is now a magnet school for the fine and performing arts.

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Emmett Till’s funeral began shortly after his body came home to Chicago. The A. A. Rayner Funeral home opened its doors for the initial viewing on Friday, September 2. On Sunday, Till's body was moved to the Robert’s Temple of the Church of God in Christ for a deeply emotional service. The church remained open for two days as a steady stream of people came to pay their last respects—one hundred thousand of them, according to the police estimate. After final prayers on Tuesday morning, fifty cars followed Emmett’s hearse to the burial ground at Burr Oak Cemetery.

In midcentury Chicago, death was just as segregated as life. Burr Oak Cemetery was founded in 1927 in Alsip, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, financed by prominent south-side businessmen as a final resting place for African-Americans. Famous contemporaries of Emmett Till were buried there including heavyweight boxing champion Ezzard Charles, songwriter/producer Willie Dixon, gospel singer Roberta Martin, and Dinah Washington, “the queen of the blues.”

It was warm even for early September when Emmett Till’s body was laid to rest in Burr Oak. Two hundred people gathered at the gravesite for one last round of tears and prayer and remembrance. His ground level marker read simply, “Emmett Till, In Loving Memory” along with the dates of his birth and death, and a tiny photo of him from Christmas, 1954. As the decades passed, Mamie Till-Mobley was increasingly dissatisfied with the conditions and upkeep of the grounds. Till's gravesite was often flooded, the headstone was broken by mowers, the picture was in tatters, and the vase designed to hold flowers would no longer stand upright. She longed to move the body to the beautiful Oak Woods Cemetery and established a fundraising campaign to make it happen.

In 2001, however, Burr Oak Cemetery came under new management. Under the direction of Carolyn Towns, the cemetery satisfied Till-Mobley with a promise to build a museum called the “Emmett Till Historical Museum.” The museum would honor the legacy of Emmett and provide a final resting spot for him, Till-Mobley, and her long-time husband Gene Mobley. It never came to pass.

In May 2004, nearly fifty years after his burial, the FBI reopened the Till case. The Cook County Medical Examiner set up a tent at Burr Oak Cemetery and exhumed Till’s body. The forensic exam determined that the body in Burr Oak Cemetery was in fact the body of Emmett Till. While this may seem obvious, it is important to remember that there was a dispute over the identity of the body that, in 1955, provided the jury the legal cover with which to acquit the murderers. Although Sheriff H. C. Strider indicated that Till was “colored” on the death certificate, he testified in trial that the body was so decomposed that he could not identify its race. This was willed ignorance, designed to provide a legal mechanism to let the murderers walk free. With this background, the 2005 exhumation takes on new importance. The forensic exam marked the end of Strider’s racist lie.

Three days after the FBI exhumed the body, they set the body in a new coffin and, in a private ceremony, reinterred the body. Because the long-promised Emmett Till Historical Museum had not yet come to pass, the family understood the reburial as a temporary measure. When the museum was complete, they believed Till’s body would be moved once more.

In July 2009, Carolyn Towns was charged with dismembering remains, reselling occupied plots, and stealing over $100,000 from the cemetery. She pled guilty to a range of charges in 2011 and began a twelve-year prison sentence in November of that year.

Although Till’s plot was not harmed by Town’s scheme, she had not cared for Till’s casket. Following the exhumation, the original casket sat in a neglected storage shed and was occupied by a family of possums. When it was discovered in 2009, the Till family took possession of the casket, had it restored at A. A. Rayner and Sons funeral home, and made plans to give it to Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Beautifully refurbished, that original coffin where Emmett’s body lay while one-hundred-thousand mourners passed by, where the famous photograph of his brutalized face was taken, where he rested for fifty years, now forms the centerpiece of the most moving display in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D. C. With the coffin front and center, the visitor enters a room designed to look like the Roberts Temple did in September 1955.

While the original coffin has moved to Washington, D. C., Till remains in Burr Oak Cemetery, where he was first buried in 1955. The headstone is small and relatively unadorned, the museum remains unbuilt, but the gravesite is peaceful and open to public viewing.

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Hours after Till’s body was discovered protruding from the Tallahatchie River, Mississippi authorities began to bury the body—and the story—in a rural cemetery at a rural church deep in the Mississippi Delta. Had Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley not intervened and reclaimed her son’s body, Till’s lynching may have been recorded in the history books alongside the likes of George Lee and Lamar Smith. Like Till, Lee and Smith were lynched in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. Unlike Till, their stories have been largely forgotten. The difference in their respective fates can be traced to Mamie Till-Mobley's demand that the "world see" what happened to her son. It was at Robert’s Temple Church of God in Christ that the world saw. As Yvette Johnson wrote in the Song and the Silence, Mamie Till-Mobley changed the world with the open-casket funeral.

Upon arriving back in Chicago on the morning of September 2, 1955, the first stop for Till’s body was the A. A. Rayner Funeral home which, in 1955, was located at the corner of 41st and Cottage Grove. The casket arrived locked, sealed with the state seal of Mississippi, and accompanied by orders that the casket was not to be opened. If Mississippi authorities could not bury the body in a nameless cotton field, they hoped their seal would keep Till’s story under wraps. It did not work.

Till-Mobley disregarded the order and insisted that the casket be opened. It was at A. A. Rayner Funeral Home that she uttered the famous phrase: “Let the world see what they did to my boy.” Following Mamie's wishes, Rayner placed the body in the front room of their facility in a glass-topped casket. Over the next two days, as many as fifty thousand people would visit the funeral home to pay their respects.

Among the throngs at the funeral home was the photographer David Jackson. Jackson was a photographer for Johnson Publications, and Till-Mobley allowed him to be on the podium at the twelfth street station when Till’s body arrived. He then accompanied the body to Rayner and, when Till-Mobley opened the casket, he took a picture and published it in Johnson Publication’s leading outlets: Jet and the Chicago Defender. In a way that words could never do, Jackson’s photograph captured the sheer violence visited on the body—and especially the face—of Emmett Till. Although the brutality of the picture is difficult to describe, the words of John Edgar Wideman come close. He described a face “crushed, chewed, [and] mutilated.” A face “with all the boy, all the human being battered out of it.” Jackson’s photograph transformed the Till murder from one more 1955 Mississippi lynching into the unforgettable spark of the civil rights movement. Delta activist Amzie Moore may have put it best, claiming that the photograph made Till’s murder “the best advertised lynching I had ever heard.”

For black Chicago, however, the Jackson photograph was only the beginning. On Sunday, September 4th, the body was moved to the Robert’s Temple Church of God in Christ—the home congregation of Mamie Till and her mother Alma. The two-thousand seat auditorium was filled to capacity for the funeral, and several thousand more listened to the 90-minute service on loudspeakers set up outside the church. The sermon was given by Bishop Louis Ford, who used the funeral to call on President Eisenhower to “go into the Southern states and tell the people there . . . that unless the Negro gets full freedom in America, it is impossible for us to be leaders in the rest of the world.” He closed the sermon by announcing that the burial would be delayed until Tuesday and the body would lay in state for the next two days.

The following 48 hours saw an estimated one-hundred thousand mourners file past the body.

In 1991, Robert’s Temple Church of God in Christ underwent a major renovation. The iconic cross-shaped marquis was removed, a tan brick facade was installed over the top of the original storefront, an angular roofline hid the original curved profile, a drop-ceiling was installed, and the balcony was removed.

On March 29, 2006, Robert’s Temple was designated as a Chicago Landmark. The small plaque on the west side of the building is the only visible acknowledgement of the church’s key role in the Till story.

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