Cultural preservation organization African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund released $3 million in grants to 33 historic sites, including the childhood home of Emmett Till, the Black teenager who was abducted and brutally killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman in 1955, Winona Daily News reported.
The home on Chicago’s Southside, which belonged to Till’s mother, the late Mamie Till Mobley, is set to receive funding for a project director who is scheduled to oversee restoration efforts such as restoring the second floor to what it looked like when the Tills lived there.
Local nonprofit group Blacks in Green purchased the home in 2020. Now, with
renovations happening, executive director Naomi Davis said she hopes to reopen the home to the public in 2025, around the same time as the opening of the Obama Presidential Library. “This house is a sacred treasure from our perspective, and our goal is to restore it and reinvent it as an international heritage pilgrimage destination,” she said.Action Fund executive director Brent Leggs said in the fifth year of funding, the organization’s intentions are to fill “some gaps in the nation’s understanding of the civil rights movement.” Some of the other sites set to be preserved include a Mississippi bank founded by the “most influential businessman in the United States,” Booker T. Washington; a home in Virginia where tennis greats Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson were trained; the first Black masonic lodge in North Carolina; and Detroit’s the Blue Bird Inn, considered to be the birthplace of bebop jazz.
Leggs wanted the Till home, in particular, to be highlighted, as Emmett’s killing was labeled as a staple in the civil rights movement. He continues to push the narrative that preserving the home is especially important so Ms. Mobley can get her shine.
After Emmett’s tragic death, Mobley insisted that her son’s body be displayed in an open casket — just as it was when pulled out of the river — in an
effort to show the world what racism looks like. “It was a catalytic moment in the civil rights movement, and through this, we lift and honor Black women in civil rights,” Leggs said.The person who knows best about the “moment” Emmett was taken was his cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr, who said his death “was like a nightmare, but it wasn’t a nightmare” during a Black History Month celebration in Milwaukee. According to Fox 6 News, Parker was the only living relative who was with Till the night he was lynched in Mississippi. The next time he saw his cousin was at the funeral.
Parker said he doesn’t know if he could’ve made the same decision his aunt made — having an open casket — but called her “courageous” for doing it. “I never thought about it, letting his body be seen like that, but she was a courageous woman,” Parker said.
“Every time I saw her, I had survivors’ guilt; I came back, and he didn’t.”
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