Burr Oak Cemetery — the Black-owned south suburban cemetery that’s the final resting place of Mamie and Emmett Till, singer Dinah Washington, rapper King Von and generations of other prominent figures — appears headed for a listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council has approved recommending that designation to the U.S. Park Service’s keeper of the National Register.
“I’m still on a cloud,” said Edward Boone, founder and chairperson of the nonprofit Friends of Burr Oak Cemetery. “Like I won an NBA championship. It’s really great … because I know, with the value of having that status, the resources that it will bring.”
The state recommendation usually leads to an automatic listing on the register, but the current federal government shutdown will delay the designation.
National Register-listed cemeteries in the Chicago area include Bohemian National, Rosehill and Graceland.
Until the 1960s, Burr Oak, 4400 W. 127th St., Alsip, was one of a handful of Chicago-area cemeteries that didn’t follow the racist practice of refusing to bury Black people.
Author and historian Jean Guarino, who wrote the cemetery’s National Register nomination report on behalf of Friends of Burr Oak, said the designation could shine additional light on its history and importance.
“It’s a Black-owned and Black-managed cemetery … established in 1927 in the face of adamant white opposition,” Guarino said. “It’s the burial place of just countless fascinating individuals in the Black community, some of whom were nationally prominent in their respective fields.”
Burr Oak “really needs to be understood in terms of the Great Migration and civil rights history.”
‘A beautiful expansive park’
Burr Oak was established by executives of Supreme Life Insurance, a Black-owned company at 35th Street and South Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Bronzeville. The insurance company was established in 1921 because white-owned insurers wouldn’t issue policies to Black people. Burr Oak was created because Chicago area cemeteries practiced the same exclusion.
For instance, Mount Hope Cemetery, 11500 S. Fairfield Ave., took out advertisements on streetcars touting itself as “exclusively for the White race,” according to Guarino’s research.
The Supreme Life group turned 150 acres in Worth Township into Burr Oak. The village of Alsip was formed and incorporated in a bid to stop the cemetery’s creation.
According to Burr Oak’s National Register nomination, the cemetery was designed in the “memorial park” style, predominantly with flat headstones and grave markers, broad, sweeping lawns and curvilinear roads. The cemetery’s landscape is “filled with a wide variety of maple tree species and a variety of pine, hickory, and oak trees.”
“There are [almost] no upright monuments,” Guarino said. “When you walk through the gate of that cemetery, it looks like you’re in a beautiful, expansive park.”
Burr Oak has 25 sections with names such as Acacia Lawn, Maple Wood, Mugho Pine, East Elm Grove and Baby Land. The cemetery also has a granite-walled mausoleum with a depiction of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper.”
Burr Oak was featured in the poignant ending of the 1975 film “Cooley High.”
But the 33,000 people buried at Burr Oak — a great number of them notables — are the cemetery’s most important feature.
Till, the 14-year-old Chicagoan whose 1955 lynching at the hands of Mississippi racists — and the barbarity made public when Mamie Till Mobley ordered an open-casket funeral for her son — is among those buried there. Mobley and her husband Gene also are interred at Burr Oak.
Other well-known figures at Burr Oak include bluesman Willie Dixon, real estate executive Carl Hansberry, who was the father of writer Lorraine Hansberry, sportswriter and broadcaster Wendell Smith, actor and singer Etta Moten Barnett and her husband, journalist Claude Barnett, heavyweight boxing champ Ezzard Charles and activist and professor Timuel Black Jr.
About 20 Negro League baseball players are buried there. So is hair-care pioneer Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone, who became the country’s first Black woman millionaire years before her more-celebrated rival, Madam C.J. Walker.
“We looked at so many graves of individuals who were born 1865 or before, and so we pretty much assumed that there’s a high probability that they were former slaves,” Boone said. “And so we put African American flags on all of their graves during Juneteenth. We think it’s important to recognize these individuals.”
Change going to come?
Burr Oak has had its troubles, suffering from flooding, sunken headstones, difficult-to-follow signage and overgrown conditions.
In 2009, a Cook County sheriff’s investigation found that cemetery employees were reselling graves by illegally digging up old remains to make room for new ones and burying caskets on top of existing graves.
The employees were convicted, and the cemetery manager got a 12-year prison sentence.
The cemetery is now under new ownership. And the Friends of Burr Oak was formed to help improve the site and act as a liaison between the cemetery’s operators and the families of those buried there.
Boone said he hopes the National Register listing will aid efforts to improve the cemetery. The group plans to start by soliciting funds for signage “that recognizes the important individuals that are buried there [and would have] some directions to their resting site and maybe a little information about them,” Boone said.
He’d also like to have a mobile app to direct people to where loved ones are buried.
“The cemetery deserves this recognition,” Guarino said.