‘Have you checked on your ancestors?’ This woman brings dignity to deceased Black Chicagoans

Curious City

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture, Education, Public, Chicago, Arts, City, Radio, Curious, Investigation

4.8 • 642 Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2025

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tammy Gibson wants you to visit the gravesites of your deceased relatives. “Have you checked on your ancestors?” said Gibson, the founder of Sankofa TravelHer, an organization dedicated to honoring the legacy of African-Americans who were often denied dignity in death. As we learned last episode, Chicago’s long history of segregation affected both the living and the dead, as many area cemeteries once offered burial space “for the exclusive use of the Caucasian race.” So where did African-Americans bury their loved ones in the 19th and early 20th centuries? “From my research, African-Americans could not get buried in Chicago,” Gibson told Curious City. Instead, she said many African-Americans buried their dead in the South Suburbs, at cemeteries like Mount Glenwood in Glenwood, Ill., and later Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Ill. In this episode, Gibson tells us about the people who first started these cemeteries and the notable people buried there. She talks about the work she does to continue honoring the deceased, including offering a reinterment ceremony years after the 2009 grave-stacking scandal at Burr Oak Cemetery. Gibson also works to get headstones for notable Chicagoans who do not have them. This includes Eugene Williams, whose death sparked the 1919 Chicago Race Riot, and journalist Ethel Payne from Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, who was known as the First Lady of the Black Press.

Transcript

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0:33.0	What's up, Chicago? I'm Erin Allen, and this is Curious City.
0:41.0	There is a long history of segregation in Chicago,
0:49.3	and that goes for both the living and the dead. In our last episode, we learned how some cemeteries used to refuse burial for people of certain racial or ethnic groups. Today, I'm talking to somebody who spends
0:56.9	her time bringing awareness and dignity to folks who were denied it. Tammy Gibson. I travel all over,
1:03.5	I just get in my car where I fly, and then I view the world as a classroom. Tammy honors the legacy
1:09.3	of noteworthy black people, both here in Chicago and across the world.
1:13.5	She got into this work several years ago, taking a tour of a former plantation in the American South.
1:19.5	Unfortunately, the history of the enslaved people were never part of the tour. And one of the tour guys that I started really talking to, he said, after work, I want to take you to a sacred grounds that they don't put as part as the tour.
1:32.0	It was a cemetery for enslaved people, which is something Tammy had never seen before.
1:37.9	She says the idea kind of scared her.
1:40.0	She didn't know what she was going to see out there.
1:42.1	And it didn't help that it was two miles away from the big house
1:45.5	and through some fields and woods.
1:48.0	All of a sudden, as we walked into the center of the cemetery, you just saw the depression.
1:52.8	You saw sunken grave sites.
1:55.1	It was like rows of six.
	...

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