The burial site for Eugene Williams at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island — which was unmarked for 102 years — finally received recognition Saturday thanks to the efforts of a group of concerned citizens.
The Black 17-year-old, whose raft drifted south past an invisible line segregating neighborhoods by color, was stoned to death by an unidentified white man near 29th Street Beach on July 27, 1919, sparking the worst race riot in Chicago history.
The cemetery is the final resting place for many notable Chicagoans in the city’s African American community — especially those with ties to literature, sports, music and history.
If you plan to visit Williams’ grave in Section 5 of the cemetery, here’s a guided tour of others within Lincoln Cemetery not to be missed.
Robert Sengstacke Abbott (1870-1940)
Founder, Chicago Defender
Read his obituary in the Chicago Tribune from March 1, 1940
Abbott started the newspaper he called “The World’s Greatest Weekly” on May 5, 1905, encouraging Black Americans born and raised in the South — like himself — to move north during the Great Migration of the 20th century. More than two thirds of the newspaper’s readership base was located outside of Chicago by the start of World War I, according to the Defender. Evolving from a weekly into a daily newspaper, the Defender became a national voice for African Americans, documenting racial inequality and championing the civil right movement.
Abbott thanked the children who sold his newspaper on street corners by throwing a parade in their honor. It’s known today as the Bud Billiken Parade.
The Defender ceased print publication in 2019, but still exists in a digital format at chicagodefender.com.
Lillian “Lil” Hardin Armstrong (1898-1971)
Jazz musician, composer and bandleader
Location: Garden of Peace mausoleum (map)
Read her obituary in the Chicago Tribune from Aug. 28, 1971
An accomplished pianist and songwriter in her own right, she taught her husband of seven years — trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong — how to read music. After separating from Louis in 1931, she led two all-women bands and wrote “Just For a Thrill,” which became a hit for Ray Charles.
She became ill at the piano while playing “St. Louis Blues” at Chicago’s Civic Center Plaza in 1971 during a tribute to her late ex-husband and died on the way to the hospital.
A park in the Grand Boulevard area, just blocks from the home she formerly shared with Armstrong at 421 E. 44th St., is named in her honor.
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
First African American to win a Pulitzer Prize and Illinois poet laureate for more than 30 years
Read her obituary in the Chicago Tribune from Dec. 4, 2000
Moving to the South Side as a baby and finding inspiration in its residents, Brooks started writing poetry when she was 7. She was only a teenager when her poems were published in American Childhood and the Chicago Defender, garnering her widespread attention.
Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950, for “Annie Allen,” a collection of works about a Black girl growing into womanhood while wrestling with racism, sexism, poverty and loss. A review in the Chicago Tribune praised its “quick sense of the life of many people, the small intensities and the big disasters.”
Brooks taught at Columbia College, Northeastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College of New York and the University of Wisconsin, in addition to mentoring countless young writers. Family and friends alike knew, however, not to call her when her favorite soap opera “All My Children” was on TV because she would hang up, her daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, told reporters in 2010.
Brooks also was the first Black woman to serve as a poetry consultant for the Library of Congress and she was the state’s poet laureate from 1968 until her death in 2000.
The Poetry Foundation commissioned a story of her life called “No Blue Memories,” which was produced by Manual Cinema in 2017. A bronze statue of Brooks was installed in 2018 in the North Kenwood park on South Greenwood Avenue that carries her name.
Bessie Coleman (1892-1926)
First American woman to gain an international pilot’s license and world’s first licensed Black pilot
Read her obituary in the Chicago Tribune from May 1, 1926
Coleman moved to Chicago at 23 and decided to become an aviatrix after hearing stories about the opportunities available for women overseas — likely from a brother who served in France during World War I.
When American flight schools refused to accept her, Coleman, then working as a manicurist, learned French and saved money from her day job in anticipation of a move to Europe. Chicago Defender founder Robert S. Abbott — who is also buried in Lincoln Cemetery — and banker Jesse Binga helped pay her tuition at flight schools in France.
On June 15, 1921, Coleman obtained an international pilot’s license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale — almost two years before fellow aviator Amelia Earhart. She returned to the United States and became a renowned stunt flyer with plans to open her own flight school.
She died during a rehearsal in Jacksonville, Florida, on April 30, 1926, after a wrench became jammed in the controls of her plane.
A group of African American pilots organized the Challenger Air Pilots Association five years after Coleman’s death, according to the Chicago History Museum, and founded an airport in Robbins. It was the first airport built by and for Black pilots. Many of these groundbreaking aviators are also buried in Lincoln Cemetery.
Andrew Rube Foster (1879-1930)
Called “the father of Black baseball”
Read his obituary in the Chicago Tribune from Dec. 11, 1930
Foster helped create the Negro National Leagues on Feb. 13, 1920, and was elected its president.
The Texas native was also a talented pitcher who played for several teams including the Chicago Union Giants in 1902 before moving to Cuba. As owner-manager of the Chicago American Giants, Foster’s team was allowed to play on the White Sox’s old grounds thanks to a partnership he formed with a son-in-law of Charles Comiskey.
He was overcome by a gas leak in an Indianapolis boardinghouse in 1925. Midway through the next season, he left the team for what the Defender called “a much needed vacation.”
Foster died in a psychiatric hospital in Kankakee on Dec. 9, 1930. He had been committed to the asylum four years earlier after attempting to stab an acquaintance with an ice pick, the Tribune reported.
His funeral at a church in Bronzeville was attended by thousands — including an overflow crowd of 3,000 people who “stood in the snow and rain.”
Foster was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1981.
Octavius Granady (1872-1928)
Murdered Republican candidate for 20th Ward committeeman
Read his obituary in the Chicago Tribune from April 11, 1928
Granady, a 43-year-old Black attorney, ran for Republican committeeman against mob-backed white candidate Morris Eller in the “Bloody 20th” Ward on the West Side in 1928. On Election Day, two cars of gunmen chased Granady’s car, which crashed into a tree. Granady was then shot to death for the crime of participating in a democracy. Nine men, including five police officers, were charged, but no one was convicted.
Granady’s burial location in the southwest corner of Section 8 in Lincoln Cemetery has no grave marker.
Vivian Harsh (1890-1960)
Chicago Public Library’s first Black librarian
Read her obituary in the Chicago Tribune from Aug. 20, 1960
Harsh spent 26 years of her 50-year career at the library assembling an expansive collection of African American history and literature — the largest of its kind in the Midwest. Then known as the Special Negro Collection, its today called the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection and it’s housed at the Carter G. Woodson Regional Library on the city’s Far South Side.
Elder Lucy Smith (1875-1952)
First woman to pastor a major congregation in Chicago
Read her obituary in the Chicago Tribune from June 25, 1952
The Georgia-born Baptist founded her own church in 1918, All Nations Pentecostal Church. The sanctuary provided food and clothing to thousands of Chicagoans during the Great Depression, according to the Chicago Public Library, but was best known for its gospel music. Radio broadcasts of music and live worship — the first ever to be broadcast from a Black church — aired weekly through 1955.
Smith’s funeral in 1952 was attended by more than 50,000 people and featured, at her request, pageantry akin to processions she experienced during childhood. Two horses pulled a 100-year-old hearse carrying her casket and was “guided by two formally attired, top hatted men,” the Tribune reported. Photos from Smith’s life and funeral adorn her grave marker.
Check out the Tribune’s archives at your fingertips at Newspapers.com.
Sources: Tribune reporting and archives; Lincoln Cemetery; Findagrave.com; Chicago Public Library; Chicago Defender; Chicago Park District; National Women’s History Museum; Chicago History Museum; Britannica; Smithsonian Institution; Major League Baseball
