Michelle Obama’s father buried at Burr Oak
newsdeskinternational ♦ 07/14/2009 ♦ 13 Comments
Written by Janet
We’ve all heard by now the horrific story of how the bodies in the Illinois cemetary were dug up, dismembered and buried in a mass grave, in a money scheme, reselling the plots. Fraser Robinson III, father of first lady Michelle Obama, is buried in Burr Oak Cemetery near Chicago where hundreds of graves were desecrated.
White House spokeswoman Camille Johnson, the first lady’s communications director, Tuesday said Robinson was buried at the cemetery in Alsip, Ill., in 1991 after his death from complications from multiple sclerosis.
As of this moment, there’s no indication that Robinson’s grave was among the hundreds disturbed in an alleged macabre scheme by cemetery employees to empty and resell grave sites. This historic black cemetary has been declared a crime scene and closed to the public. Officers Tuesday began conducting a shoulder-to-shoulder search of four quadrants of the grounds looking for disturbed graves to determine if the right bodies are buried in the right plot.
Robinson worked as a pump operator for the Chicago Water Department and was a Democratic Party precinct captain. Her mother, Marian Robinson, left her South Side home in January and moved into the White House when her son-in-law, U.S. President Barack Obama, was inaugurated.
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- Posted in: Crime & Punishment
- Tagged: Burr Oak, cemetary, Michelle Obama, plots resold
Newsdesk International 
Illinois wants to freeze millions in trust funds controlled by the owner of a cemetery where at least 300 bodies allegedly were discarded, sources said.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/07/14/Illinois-moves-to-freeze-cemetery-funds/UPI-90241247589510/
Records at troubled Chicago cemetery falling apart
Records at the suburban Chicago cemetery where four people are accused of unearthing bodies in an alleged moneymaking scheme have been found disintegrating and rotting in a rusty file cabinet, authorities said Tuesday.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g_e_fmZCCG4K9wX0arcCdNia07IQD99EHTQG0
Ill. cemetery worker says threat led him to inform
A gravedigger who helped expose an alleged scheme to dig up graves and resell plots at a suburban Chicago cemetery says he only spoke up after a co-worker warned him to keep his mouth shut or risk losing his job.
Willie Esper told The Associated Press on Monday that he told a supervisor at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip that he spotted bones while practicing digging graves.
He says he wasn’t going to push the issue until a co-worker asked him how he would feed his young son without a job. Esper says he got mad and started talking within earshot of a colleague he knew would spread the word.
Esper’s version of events is fairly consistent with what prosecutors have said in court documents. Four people are charged in the case.
Burr Oak Cemetery hearing to be held
A hearing will be held monday to hopefully help state lawmakers understand how the crimes of digging up bodies and reselling plots could have gone on for so long without anyone noticing.
The special hearing at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse also will consider whether the federal government should have some role in cemetery oversight.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-burr-oak-hearing-27jul27,0,1909974.story
Discarded Burial Vaults Found at Chicago Cemetery
Authorities say they’ve found discarded burial vaults in a heavily wooded part of a historic black Chicago-area cemetery where workers allegedly dug up bodies and dumped them in a scheme to resell plots.
Cook County Sheriff’s office spokesman Steve Patterson says about 10 to 12 cement vaults were found in the same area where hundreds of remains were discovered this month.
Patterson said Friday that officials didn’t know how many bodies were buried in the vaults at the Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, but he says it looks as if cemetery workers were purposely trying to hide them.
Four workers were charged in the alleged scheme at the cemetery where civil rights-era lynching victim Emmett Till is buried.
Blacks lament cemetery scandal’s affect on history
Harold Lucas was raised with the stories about his grandparents, who rode segregated railroad cars from Missouri to Chicago in the 1930s and worked tirelessly to raise their family into the middle class.
Jeff and Ida Lucas were buried in Burr Oak Cemetery, alongside thousands of black Americans who made up the Great Migration – a movement north during the first half of the 20th century.
Burr Oak, once one of the only burial places for blacks, holds a sacred spot in African-American history – making all the worse allegations that workers there dug up bodies and dumped them to resell the burial plots.
People like Lucas see desecration of the cemetery as evidence their people’s history is slipping away and forgotten. He and others say they don’t know how to tell young blacks to be proud of their heritage when it has been treated so carelessly.
“We need these physical reminders,” said Lucas, 66. “This is about emancipation. About breaking the cycle of poverty.”
State records don’t show when the cemetery was founded, but some headstones date to the late 1800s. Historians say that until the mid-1900s it was one of just two cemeteries in the Chicago area that were open to blacks.
Last month, Burr Oak was temporarily closed as investigators search for evidence that bodies were double-stacked in graves or tossed in a grassy field. Hundreds of families converged on the cemetery, hoping to confirm that their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents remain in their graves.
Four former workers, all black, have been arrested on felony counts of dismembering and tampering with bodies.
“There’s a real sense of betrayal,” Chicago-based civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said. “We’ve never known something of this magnitude before.”
Lucas, president and CEO of the Black Metropolis Convention and Tourism Council, rarely visited Burr Oak, but the thought of it was important to him.
His grandparents settled in a roughly 5-square mile strip on Chicago’s South Side that was home to many migrated blacks. They worked as servants in white families’ homes, saved money and moved to a wealthier neighborhood, where they contributed to their church and gave their children a good education.
Even after cemeteries opened to all races, black Chicagoans continued to join their relatives at Burr Oak. It became the final resting place for civil rights figure Emmett Till, singer Dinah Washington, blues musician Willie Dixon, Negro League pitcher John Donaldson and NFL player J. Mayo Williams. In 1975, Burr Oak was the setting for one of the final scenes in the movie “Cooley High.”
Most Chicago-area blacks had someone buried there. The Rev. Marshall Hatch remembers his father, a pastor, officiating at funerals time and time again.
“The standard threat of my father to keep us on the straight and narrow was ‘There’s plenty of room in Burr Oak,”’ Hatch said.
But Hatch noticed cracks in the sidewalks and a lack of trees in the past month. To him, the cemetery has begun to resemble a big, empty lot.
Former postal worker Louella Johnson didn’t want to bury her mother in the family’s prepaid plot when she died two years ago.
“I just didn’t say anything, but I had a gut feeling,” Johnson said. “You know how you get a feeling and you can’t shake it.”
Her grandfather moved from Greenwood, Miss., to Chicago in the 1930s to take a job and slowly raised the money to send for his children. He was buried at Burr Oak and, over the years, about 30 of Johnson’s relatives joined him there. Now Johnson has to decide whether to continue the tradition.
“I got a sense of my family there once,” she said, but now “the ground is not sacred.”
Former workers at Ill. cemetery indicted
Four former employees of the Burr Oaks Cemetery in Alsip, Ill., were indicted Thursday on charges related to an alleged plot reselling ring, prosecutors say.
Prosecutors said at a Cook County Criminal Court hearing that Carolyn Towns, 49; Keith Nicks, 45; Terrence Nicks, 39; and Maurice Dailey, 59, were all indicted on charges of theft, dismembering a human body and removal of a gravestone, the Chicago Tribune said.
The four suspects also stand accused of desecration of human remains, removal of remains of a deceased human from a burial ground and conspiracy to dismember a human body.
Burr Oaks Cemetery is at the center of an investigation into alleged plot reselling activities that involved the relocation of buried bodies to mass graves.
The four suspects indicted Thursday have been accused of disinterring up to 300 bodies at the Aslip cemetery, the Tribune reported.
An arraignment hearing for the four suspects was scheduled for Aug. 26.
Burr Oak control given back to owners
The man put in charge of a suburban Chicago cemetery in the wake of a graverobbing scandal must turn the facility back to its bankrupt owners, a judge says.
Roman Szabelski of Catholic Cemeteries, a branch of the Archdiocese of Chicago, says that under a Tuesday ruling by a bankruptcy judge he must hand back the keys of the now-closed Burr Oak Cemetery to Perpetua Inc., which has been accused of digging up about 300 graves in the historic black cemetery and reselling plots for profit, the Chicago SouthtownStar reported.
Szabelski was placed in charge of Burr Oak by a judge after Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart brought criminal charges against four Perpetua employees, ranging from theft to dismembering a body, the newspaper said.
“I feel bad for the families who wanted to have access to Burr Oak Cemetery,” he told the SouthtownStar. “I feel I was making steps in that direction.”
Szabelski told the newspaper he had planned to begin reburying bodies as soon as this week and to reopen the facility soon thereafter, but that those plans had been dashed by the bankruptcy ruling.
A Chicago-area cemetery that was shut down after four former workers were accused of digging up graves in a scheme to resell burial plots is open again.
Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip reopened Thursday morning. People boarded a bus across the street and were then driven into the cemetery to visit the graves of loved ones.
The historic black cemetery had been closed for nearly four months after authorities arrested the four workers and began searching the grounds. They found more than 1,100 human bones, some strewn among overgrown weeds.
Authorities say they discovered evidence that plots were resold and some caskets were stacked on top of each other in the ground.
All four workers have pleaded not guilty.
More Unidentified Human Remains Found at Illinois Cemetery
Officials at a cemetery where former workers allegedly dug up graves in a scheme to resell burial plots are finding human remains in the ground when they try to bury someone else.
The discoveries are being disclosed weeks after Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip was reopened. Officials said at a news conference Wednesday that while preparing sites for burial, workers found a human bone in a spot where they didn’t know anyone was buried and twice found caskets.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,578991,00.html
Future of Burr Oak Cemetery uncertain 1 year later
Louella Johnson has spent the last year hoping for answers.
More than a dozen of the Chicago woman’s relatives, including her daughter, mother and grandparents, were buried at Burr Oak Cemetery, a historic black graveyard where a gruesome desecration scandal was discovered last summer.
http://channels.isp.netscape.com/news/story.jsp?floc=ne-us-12-l3&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20100712%2F7437.htm&sc=1110
Sheriff: More dumped bodies found at Burr Oak
Bodies were dumped in an unused corner of Burr Oak Cemetery in far greater numbers than a 2009 criminal investigation originally found, according to an archaeologists’ report recently delivered to the office of Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chibrknews-sheriff-more-dumped-bodies-found-at-burr-oak-20110321,0,67936.story