Rev. Jesse Jackson to be laid to rest at Oak Woods Cemetery, 'part of the city's unrivaled historic fabric'

Greenwood Avenue, just south of 67th Street, marks the entrance to one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city, in a manner of speaking, with its wooded, rolling landscapes, curved roads and a quartet of small lakes.

You'll find a who's who of mayors, civil rights leaders, athletes, scientists and business people, along with Chicagoans from nearly every walk of life.

The locale is the 173-year-old Oak Woods Cemetery. And this week, its solemn, historic and picturesque grounds will become the final resting place of the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

"Graceland Cemetery [on the North Side] is very well-known and casts a very long shadow and is one of those places where if you're looking at historic cemeteries in the U.S. is sort of in that top 10," Charles Birnbaum, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Cultural Landscape Foundation, said. "But Oak Woods is yet another great cemetery of substantial scale that is part of the city's unrivaled historic fabric."

Roughly bounded by 67th Street, Cottage Grove Avenue, 71st Street and the Metra Electric tracks, Oak Woods was chartered by the state in 1853 and took its first burials in 1865.

Chicago was in its infancy when Oak Woods was planned. There were about 30,000 residents then, and the historic events that would shape the city, such as the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, were years away.

But Chicago was a growing city, and the Oak Woods Cemetery Association wanted to create burial grounds that befitted a metropolis on the rise.

The group hired landscape gardener Adolph Strauch to create the cemetery. The Prussian-born Strauch helped revolutionize 19th-century cemetery design, much like Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux improved parks architecture during the same time.

Strauch was a leader in "landscape lawn" design, a movement of the day that sought to make expansive cemeteries that were planned, laid out and planted like parks and recreational spaces — a substantial step up from simple church burial yards and backyard plots.

His magnum opus is the stunning 730-acre Spring Grove, a cemetery and arboretum in Cincinnati with hills, 12 small lakes, natural springs and a wealth of architecturally splendid tombs, mausoleums and grave markers.

But Strauch put in some very fine work in Chicago as well, giving Oak Woods hills, curving streets with names such as Sunset Boulevard and Memorial Drive.

The monuments there represent nearly two centuries of funerary design, inspired by Egyptian, Greek and Roman revival, Art Deco, modern and contemporary rendered in granite and marble.

Oak Woods has a naturalist feel and is visually striking under clear skies, during the verdant summer months. Fall colors are particularly magnificent.

"What you have are the plantings, the monuments, the ground plane — which is a manicured lawn — forming a unified composition," Birnbaum said. His organization advocates landscapes across North America and has studied Oak Woods.

"There's no fences around family burial plots. The eye is able to, just like the visitor, explore the grounds freely without those types of interruptions."

Beautiful and once restricted

The list of notables interred at Oak Woods is as distinguished as the cemetery's design — perhaps more so.

Jackson's name will join the roll of a silent city of 200,000, many of whom like he have made local, national and international impact.

A small stone monument marks the graves of journalist, educator and civil rights leader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who died in 1931, and her husband, attorney Ferdinand Barnett, who passed away five years later.

Olympian Jesse Owens, who died in 1980, rests by an Oak Woods lake. His marble monument is engraved with Olympic rings.

The seemingly endless list of famous people buried at Oak Woods includes Roebuck "Pops" Staples of the Staples Singers, scientist Enrico Fermi, former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington and his successor Gene Sawyer, John H. Johnson and his wife Eunice, both of Johnson Publications fame. Even Kenesaw Mountain Landis, professional baseball's first commissioner, is there.

Oak Woods also has the largest Confederate burial ground in the North, where 4,000 rebel soldiers who died at Chicago's Civil War-era prison Camp Douglas rest.

And while the cemetery is probably best-known for the Black people buried there, Oak Woods had turned away Black burials and cremations until protests in 1963 by the NAACP, Rev. Clay Evans and Rev. A.R. Leak of A.R. Leak Funeral Home stopped the racist practice.

"They organized a march from our funeral home to Oak Woods — thousands of people," Leak's grandson, Spencer Leak Jr., vice president of Leak and Sons Funeral Home, said. "That's what started Oak Woods to open up. I think it took about two weeks."

Leak and Sons planned and executed Jackson's complex funeral arrangements.

That his burial at a beautiful place that was changed for the better by protest is perhaps a fitting valedictory for the civil rights giant.