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Burr Oaks Cemetery had for years been the only graveyard in Chicagoland where African-Americans could bury their dead, CBS' Cynthia Bowers explained. It is the final resting place of boxer Ezzard Charles and singer Dinah Washington and bluesman Willie Dixon and Civil-Rights-era icon Emmett Till. The cemetery is now making headlines because it turned out not to be a final resting place for as many as 300 of its dead.
CBS' Bowers called it a "sickening scheme." NBC's Kevin Tibbles called it "a macabre act." Prosecutors called it a $300,000 fraud. A trio of gravediggers and a manager are charged with reselling plots for new coffins by graverobbing old ones. "A pile of bones from more than 100 bodies has been discovered above ground in an older and overgrown section," NBC's Tibbles told us. Precisely whose bodies have not been allowed to rest in peace is hard to reconstruct because many bereaved families were too poor to afford a headstone for their departed kin. Tibbles added that a team of FBI forensic experts "with experience examining mass graves in Serbia" has been brought in to assist in identification.
The day's second race-related headline came from the suburbs of Philadelphia. The Valley Swim Club had agreed with Creative Steps, a summer day camp, to lease its pool for weekly swimming sessions. The camp has 60-or-so children, mostly black and Latino, according to ABC's Dan Harris: "You get ready. You jump in the pool. Most of the white people get out of the pool." A couple of days later the Valley returned Creative Steps' money and told the campers not to return. It explained that the camp's children would "change the complexion" of the club. Later, NBC's Ron Allen reported, when Valley was accused of racism, it released a second statement calling such allegations "completely untrue. We underestimated the capacity of our facilities."
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