Justice for Emmett Till
The last living witness to Till's abduction releases memoir
The Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. lives just outside Justice.
This has been true his whole life. In the geographic sense, he has lived in Summit, Illinois (or the subdivision of Argo, annexed long ago into Summit), for most of his 83 years. Summit ambles alongside the Des Plaines River, a bit north of the village of Justice. In a more poetic sense, though, Parker has also lived outside justice since 1955, when he visited Mississippi with his cousin Emmett Till. He is the last witness to the encounter that sealed Till's fate and the last living witness to Till's abduction four nights later.
Other than Carolyn Bryant, whose accusation unleashed the full wrath of
Jim Crow.
She's almost 90 today. Till was murdered at 14.
The irony of having lived outside Justice most of his life — not to mention the twin irony of being born in a Mississippi town named Slaughter — is not exactly lost on Parker.
“I mean, some things are literally true,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, fixing his gaze, grinning tightly: “You do live in America, right? You have heard about its history?”
His burden
There's a haunting moment in Parker's new memoir, “A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice for My Cousin and Best Friend, Emmett Till” (written with Northwestern University journalism professor Christopher Benson), in which he wonders what Till was thinking as he was led to his death. The story has been told often: In 1955, Bryant alleged that Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Chicago visiting his relatives, wolf-whistled at her in a grocery store. Four days later, in the middle of the night, there was a knock on the door of the home where Till slept. Two men, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband, carrying guns and flashlights, ordered Till to dress and drove off with him. Till was tortured, lynched and shot in the head. His death served as a catalyst for the nascent civil rights movement.
What's less known is Parker's burden.
What it was like to be in that bedroom, how he felt unable to move. That
ceaseless weight, he writes, “connected me and preserved my compassion” for strangers, a pain he channeled into a lifetime of service in his ministry. But some questions never fade: Could Parker have saved his cousin? Was Till wondering why Parker, then 16, had not leapt out of bed and taken on two adults with shotguns? “As he was forced along his death march,” Parker writes, “did (Till) think it would turn out OK, that somehow, some way, his cousin would come after him?”
Parker has spent much of his life — with Benson at his side for the past several years — wondering, adding flesh to Till the historical figure, pursuing something like a resolution.
But as Benson puts it, “Justice would mean Emmett coming home alive. Nobody's been called to answer for him. So there can be no justice. What we want is accountability.”
Still, he adds, hands splayed: What does that even look like almost 70 years later?
Becoming an advocate
A visit to Parker's office on a February morning offers ideas. The small, narrow room is tucked beside the chapel of his church, the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ, formed in 1926 by Alma Carthan, a grandmother of Emmett Till. Parker has been a pastor here since the late 1970s. His office walls are partly wood paneling, covered in images from the church's history and, more recently, photos of Parker with President Joe Biden. He visited Washington last year, as a White House guest when the president signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Law, remarkably the very first law to classify lynching as a federal hate crime. A decade earlier, Parker was also instrumental in getting the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act to carry his cousin's
name. Benson, who is also a lawyer, helped Parker navigate legislative hoops. No one was ever charged with Till's murder, but as Parker sees it: If you violate these laws now, you answer to Till anyway.
Parker and Till grew up down the street from the church. Parker's childhood home is gone, but Till's remains. Parker is working with the Department of the Interior, the National Park Service and the National Parks Conservation Association to create a noncontiguous park that includes this street, Till's grave in Burr Oak Cemetery and locations in Mississippi.
The neighborhood, Parker said, has changed. There were more Black people then. Classrooms were much smaller. Chickens and cows roamed around. Their street went unpaved.
“But there were bricks,” said Benson.
“Bricks?” laughed Parker. “We weren't that fortunate. Holes!”
Parker and Benson are touring a lot these days; Parker, always a popular school speaker during Black History Month, is partly promoting the book, partly working with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, which created a traveling exhibition about Till.
Benson met Parker decades ago when he was working on a memoir with Mamie Till-Mobley, Till's mother. Parker, however, wasn't interested in his own book. The story had been repeated so often. On the other hand, he occasionally heard from people that Till got what he deserved. He would hear his cousin described in unrecognizable ways. He never could shake a 1956 Look magazine piece that questioned Till's character. “The parts that weren't right got repeated so often,” he said, “you felt helpless to correct it.”
Then, in 2017, Duke University historian Timothy Tyson released “The Blood