At about 9 a.m. local time on Thursday, the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. arrived by train in Greenwood, Mississippi. He traveled for nearly 13 hours from Chicago aboard the Amtrak City of New Orleans. This first-of-its-kind commemorative ride was done to honor the life of his cousin and best friend, Emmett Till.
Parker and Till made the same journey 70 years ago this month. But back then, their trip, which was supposed to be a joyous reunion with family, became a nightmare.
One day in August 1955, near Money, Mississippi, Parker, who was 16 years old at the time, went to the store with some of his relatives, including Till, who was just 14.
Parker lived in Chicago, next door to Till, but he spent his formative years in the Jim Crow South; he knew its social mores well, unlike Till. The younger cousin never seemed to have a bad day, Parker said, and he loved to be the center of attention and pay people to tell him jokes. That day at the store, the fun-loving Till reportedly whistled at a white woman, though there are reports that she lied about the incident.
Several nights later, white men came to the house where Parker was staying, wanting revenge for this act they saw as a challenge to the country’s racial order. It was the last time Parker saw Till. The men abducted the younger boy, and his bloated body was retrieved from the Tallahatchie River days later.
Seven decades after the lynching, Parker and supporters are as determined as ever to keep Till’s memory alive, and to speak out against racial injustice. This work is especially crucial today, they say, as attempts to whitewash the painful chapters of Black history escalate.
President Donald Trump claimed in a post on his social media platform this month that the Smithsonian Institution — which holds Till’s original glass-topped casket — is “out of control” and “woke.” He also said that his team will review these sites, with the goal of purging them of information that it believes portrays the country in a negative light.
“If you didn’t live back in that time, it’s hard to believe that something [like Till’s murder] happened,” Parker, 86, told Capital B. “A lot of people in America, they want us to forget. They don’t want us to tell those kinds of stories. The story of what happened to Emmett isn’t a pleasant story. It’s an ugly story. But it’s history. You’ve got to tell it.”
This week, many people are doing just that.
Parker’s train ride was organized by the National Parks Conservation Association and the Emmett Till Interpretive Center. He was joined by others close to the tragedy, including Juliet Louis, the widow of Willie Reed. He testified during the trial of Till’s killers that he had seen the boy being taken away in a truck.
The ride was the brain child of Jessie Jaynes-Diming, who coordinates special events for the center. It was in the works for years, the Chicago native and Tallahatchie County transplant told Capital B. And it grew from her work as a founding member of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission, which preserves sites important to the Till case.
“When I pitched the idea to [Parker], I was mindful of his age and health, but he was very excited,” said Jaynes-Diming, 73. “There’s a commitment to telling the truth, to telling the facts of Emmett’s murder. It sticks in my craw that some people talk about him like he was a grown man. At 14, you’re still a child. You’re still a baby.”
She added that while there were some “slight hiccups” boarding the train, the mood was “pure elation.” Everyone, including the reverend, enjoyed the “significance of the journey” they made to increase the visibility around Till’s life, she said.
Over the course of about three days, Parker is participating in commemorative activities at Mississippi Valley State University, a historically Black school in the Mississippi Delta city of Itta Bena. Several relatives and Civil Rights-era organizers are expected to be in attendance.
Similarly, in Jackson, the Two Mississippi Museums — the Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum — announced on Thursday that they had acquired a key artifact related to the Till case: the .45-caliber pistol that was allegedly used in the murder.
“We thought that this artifact was so significant that we needed to get it out of the hands of private owners and into our collection,” Michael Morris, 37, the director of the Two Mississippi Museums, told Capital B. “Till was shot. He was shot in the head with this weapon. It’s the truth of what happened to him. And that’s an important detail to this story that not many people appreciate.”
As they mark 70 years since the tragedy, Parker and supporters hope to prevent the world from looking away — from forgetting the story of the boy from Chicago whose lynching changed the course of the Black freedom struggle.
A murder that galvanized a movement
The moments leading up to Till’s kidnapping are still vivid in Parker’s mind.
Till, he said, didn’t fully understand what it was like in the Jim Crow South. It was vital that a Black person say “sir” or “ma’am” when addressing a white person. Even looking at a white person the wrong way — with “reckless eyeballs” — could cost a Black person their life.
“When Ms. [Carolyn] Bryant came out of the store that day, Emmett gave her a wolf whistle,” Parker recalled. “Man, we could have died. We made a beeline for the car and looked at Emmett like, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ That’s when he became alarmed.”
When white men, including Bryant’s husband, eventually came looking for the cousins, Parker was seized by a terror that he had never felt before, he explained.
“It was 2:30 in the morning, and I heard people talking. I heard someone say, ‘You got two boys here from Chicago,’” Parker said. “It was as dark as a thousand midnights. I couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face. I was shaking like a leaf. I knew that we were finna die.”
“It sticks in my craw that some people talk about him like he was a grown man. At 14, you’re still a child. You’re still a baby.”
Jessie Jaynes-Diming
Carrying a pistol and a flashlight, the men searched the house. When they found Till in one of the rooms, they forced him to get dressed, then they all left in a truck. Till had just turned 14 and had no idea what was about to happen to him, Parker said, adding that he still breaks down when he thinks about how something so horrific happened because of a mere whistle.
The men drove Till to a barn, mutilated him, put a bullet in his head, tied a cotton gin to his neck with barbed wire, and tossed him into the Tallahatchie River. An all-white jury acquitted the men of murder after deliberating for 67 minutes. According to one juror, they would’ve arrived at a decision sooner had they not stopped to drink Coke.
(President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law in 2022, making lynching a federal hate crime.)
Mamie Till-Mobley, Till’s mother, held a service in Chicago. She insisted on having an open-casket funeral — on letting everyone observe, with their own eyes, what had been done to her boy, whose face was beaten beyond recognition: “There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way,” she said. “And I just wanted the world to see.”
Till’s lynching was a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement, but the way that the country handled it, Parker lamented, was painful. There was a sense among white Americans that Till got what he deserved. Some Black Americans laid part of the blame for the murder at the relatives’ door, wondering how they could have let such a horrible thing happen. Parker’s guilt began to evaporate only decades later, he said.
The trauma of 1955 shaped Parker’s life. He said that at the time of the abduction, his relationship with God “wasn’t good.” But he promised God that if he lived, he would “straighten it out.”
Parker eventually became the pastor of the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ in Summit, Illinois, the church that Alma Carthan, Till’s grandmother, helped to build.
The reports about Till’s lynching touched a raw national nerve, and further cemented some people’s commitment to the movement for Black liberation.
In November 1955, Rosa Parks attended a crowded community meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights leader and one of the chief organizers in the Till case, talked about the murder of the boy from Chicago. That December, she famously refused to give up her seat on a city bus.
“I thought of Emmett Till, and I just couldn’t go back,” Parks said.
The importance of remembering
Seven decades later, the fight to remember the past has taken on new urgency, Parker and supporters say, as Trump seeks to downplay information meant to educate the public.
Trump insisted in his social media post that “everything discussed” at the Smithsonian is about “how bad slavery was.” He added that it lingers on how “unaccomplished the downtrodden have been” and has “nothing about success, nothing about brightness, nothing about the future.”
In addition to chronicling the history of the U.S. going back to slavery, the National Museum of African American History and Culture — where Till’s original casket is on display — also has an array of galleries that highlight joy and promise.
Trump suggested in his post that he intends to target the Smithsonian’s federal funding, a tactic that he’s pursued in his clashes with universities that don’t adhere to his political agenda.
And earlier this year, to comply with directions from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the National Park Service posted signs at its sites instructing visitors to use a QR code to report information that might be considered “negative about either past or living Americans.”
Burgum was acting to follow Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, which he signed in March.
Alan Spears, the senior director of cultural resources in the National Parks Conservation Association’s government affairs department, told Capital B at the time that he wonders how the National Park Service can do its job — communicate the country’s whole story — when there’s “this Big Brother figure looking over people’s shoulders.”
“Our last national monument victory was the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in the Mississippi Delta and on Chicago’s South Side,” he added. “I don’t know how you can tell that critical civil rights moment about a 14-year-old who was lynched without making some people feel uncomfortable.”
Beyond politics and alleged agendas, the murders of Black Americans have a lasting impact. Morris, with the Two Mississippi Museums, was 12 or 13 when he learned about the Till case, he said. His stepfather and mother told him about the tragedy involving a boy who was around his own age. Later, he explored an exhibit at Jackson State University, an HBCU, called Without Sanctuary. It showcased photographs of lynchings in the U.S.
Morris said that, since the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum is the first state-sponsored civil rights museum in the U.S., he feels a deep obligation to continue advancing programming that covers the entirety of Mississippi’s freedom struggle — the good and the bad.
The Museum of Mississippi History also tells an expansive story, beginning with the experiences of Native Americans and the horrors of African enslavement.
“A great deal of our job here is connecting the public with artifacts and primary resources so that we can help people to really understand Mississippi,” Morris said, noting an upcoming program on the Clinton Massacre of 1875.
This was a barbecue and political rally turned slaughterhouse that resulted in the deaths of dozens of Black Americans and marked what some argue was the beginning of the end of Reconstruction in the state.
The way Parker sees it, we can’t go forward as a country if instead of honestly confronting our past, we attempt to sanitize it — to leave parts of it out of our textbooks and museums.
“Racism isn’t going anywhere. It’s how we deal with it that matters. And one way to deal with it is by telling the truth,” he said. “Every Black family from the South got a story to tell.”