By Ben Joravsky
In 1988 Simmons decided the city ought to honorarily name 71st Street for Emmett Till, the south-side teenager lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. (Till was dragged from his uncle’s home late at night, beaten, shot in the head, and dumped into the Tallahatchie River; two defendants were acquitted by an all-white jury.)
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After months of lobbying, she won support from the six south-side aldermen through whose wards 71st Street passes, and Emmett Till commemorative street signs were installed at major intersections along a seven-mile stretch from Lake Shore Drive to Kedzie.
They clearly weren’t memories Alderman Virgil Jones wanted revived; his relatively strong support among white voters in the ward’s western precincts made him all but unbeatable in the 15th Ward.
Some residents say Simmons is making too much of honorary street signs. But Simmons says there’s a greater issue at stake. “This gets at what I call the spiritual stuff of segregation–the heart-and-mind damage. Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, the Emancipation Proclamation, what happened to Dr. King when he walked through Marquette Park–these are important parts of American history. We should think about what they mean. It’s not real racial peace if you pretend that it didn’t happen. You have to recognize the past in order to learn from it. This is very important. Jones is asking us to bury black history in order to hide white hatred, and that’s a cycle that’s got to cease.
Jones didn’t respond to several phone calls for comment. He was recently quoted in the Southwest News-Herald saying, “I’ve named 11 streets for African-Americans and they’ve all lived in the area. I don’t recall Medgar Evers ever having come to Marquette Park.” In 1994 he was quoted in the Daily Southtown saying that naming the road for Evers “could bring about racial divisiveness.”
Simmons of course sees things differently: “Jones is the one wasting taxpayers’ money–he’s the one with the city lawyer. He can stop this by naming the street for Medgar Evers. And don’t tell me Medgar Evers didn’t live here. George Washington didn’t live here, and we named a sign after him. People talk about change–when Medgar Evers Road goes into Marquette Park it will be a real sign of change.” o
