CHICAGO ILLINOIS
Cook County Seat • Illinois Local
Nickname: “The Great American City”
Chicago incorporated on March 4, 1837
City of Chicago is the third most populous city in the United States. Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (Born before 1750 – 28 August 1818) is regarded as the first permanent non-Indigenous settler of what would later become Chicago, Illinois, and is recognized as the “Founder of Chicago”.
A school, museum, harbor, park, bridge, and road have been named in his honor. The site where he settled near the mouth of the Chicago River around the 1780s is identified as a National Historic Landmark, now located in Pioneer Court.
Chicago was home to Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955), a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family’s grocery store.
The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.
Till was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. During summer vacation in August 1955, he was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region. He spoke (as Black children were taught to speak, out of respect, when seeing an adult) to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the white, married proprietor of a small grocery store there.
Till’s interaction with Bryant, perhaps unwittingly, violated the unwritten code of behavior for a Black male interacting with a white female in the Jim Crow-era South. Several nights after the incident in the store, Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother J.W. Milam, who were armed, went to Till’s great-uncle’s house and abducted Emmett and murdered him.
Till’s body was returned to Chicago where his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket, which was held at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ. It was later said that “…Her decision focused attention not only on U.S. racism and the barbarism of lynching but also on the limitations and vulnerabilities of American democracy”.
In December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott began in Alabama and lasted more than a year, resulting eventually in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional. According to historians, events surrounding Emmett Till’s life and death continue to resonate.
To help in the healing process, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission was established in the early 21st century. The Sumner County Courthouse in Sumner, in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, where the murderers were acquitted, was restored and includes the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, which opened in 2012 in his honor.
Fifty-one sites in the Mississippi Delta are memorialized as associated with Till. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, a United States law which makes lynching a federal hate crime, was signed into law on March 29, 2022 by President Joe Biden.
Emmett Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement. His death was a visible representation of the need for respect for the civil rights of all people coupled with racial justice. His death demonstrated the need for local communities to embrace cultural equality, diversity, inclusion, equity. and unity in every neighborhood including historic business-friendly communities.
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