Burr Oak Cemetery, Five Years Later

By Chuck Sudo in News on Jul 13, 2014 8:00PM

Five years ago this week one of the most horrific stories in recent memory unfolded when it was discovered caretakers at Burr Oak Cemetery, one Chicago's historic African-American cemeteries, had dug up nearly 300 graves for re-selling and dumped the bodies originally buried there in unmarked masked graves—a scheme Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart alleges went back at least five years before it was discovered and was so widespread across the 150-acre cemetery the FBI was involved in the investigation.

Cemetery manager Carolyn Towns, foreman Keith Nicks, dump-truck operator Terrence Nicks and back-hoe operator Maurice Dailey were each charged with dismembering a human body, a Class X felony. Towns was sentenced to 12 years in prison for her role in the scheme in 2011; she blamed a gambling addiction. But there were other signs of fiscal mismanagement by the company that ran Burr Oak and other historic black cemeteries

The area where the bodies dug up from their resting places and dumped is still considered a crime scene by the Sheriff’s office. Burr Oak is the final resting place to a host of notable African-Americans such as jazz singer Dinah Washington, blues great Willie Dixon, boxer Ezzard Charles and Negro League baseball players Pete Hill, James A. "Candy Jim" Taylor and J. Mayo Williams.

But the most notable person buried at Burr Oak is Emmett Till, whose brutal 1955 murder in Mississippi became one of the watershed moments of the Civil Rights movement. During the investigation into the grave-digging scheme it was discovered Carolyn Towns was soliciting donations for an "Emmett Till Historical Museum and Mausoleum" that never came to fruition. Investigators discovered Till's glass-topped casket in a storage shed in a major state of decay. (The casket was later donated to the Smithsonian Institute, where it will become part of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.)

The Tribune spoke with Burr Oak's court-appointed trustee, Patricia Brown Holmes, who mentioned a litany of improvements at the cemetery and a new monument dedicated to the bodies that were desecrated in the grave reselling scandal that will be unveiled later this month or in August. Holmes also spoke of the problems Burr Oak and other historic black cemeteries face in the 21st century. The most notable is a lack of space; Burr Oak has around 3,500 grave plots available. Holmes said one option she's looking at to spur new business is increasing the number of above ground burials and Mausoleum on the site.