The Department of Criminal Justice, Social Work and Sociology at Southeast is bringing the Reverend Wheeler Parker to campus this week. Parker will speak on Wednesday, April 12 from 1-3 p.m. and Thursday, April 13 from 5-7 p.m. in Dempster Hall Auditorium on the campus of Southeast Missouri State University.
Rev. Parker is the cousin of the late Emmett Till who was beaten and killed in Mississippi in August of 1955 at the age of 14. Parker was one of the last people to see Till alive.
Read Reverend Parker's biography.
KRCU sat down with Dr. Dana Branson and Shay Cecil to learn more about the event.
Woods: Welcome to the studio.
Branson: Thank you for having us.
Cecil: Thank you.
Woods: Shay, would you remind us about Emmett Till’s story?
Cecil: So, Emmett Till, being a young man from Chicago, went down to, Money, Mississippi, to visit his family, as families did back then. You would send your kids back down to the South with their family. So, he didn't know the norms and the mores of the South, that you couldn’t make eye contact with a white person, that you weren’t to even touch them. If you were on one side of the street, you had to move over.
So, Emmett Till had a stutter. He was a young man. He had a stutter, and he would whistle to actually help him get through his stutter. And Mamie Till, his mother, taught him how to do that. So, they..,him and his cousins…Reverend Parker Wheeler was actually one of them… They went to the general store to get some soda pop or something like that. He didn’t put the money on the counter; he put it in the lady’s hand. And he also, she suggests whistles… whistle is the debate, because now she says it never happened. But he supposedly whistled at a white woman, and for that he lost his life. And Reverend Parker happened to be one of the last people to see… he was woken up to see his cousin alive.
So Mamie Till, his mother, being the strength and courage of the civil rights movement, she had an open casket to show what happened to her boy. She wanted to show the brutality of the South, and it was because of her courage and boldness to show off what happened, to speak on behalf of her son, that it helped kick off the civil rights movement of the sixties. So, Emmett Till is one of those match points for kicking off the Civil Rights Movement, as we’ve seen with MLK and as we know it today.
Woods: And so, Dana, as I understand it, there has been a book and a movie that kind of brought about the story again. Tell us about those.
Branson: So, it was just a happy coincidence with this, the timing of everything. The reason we even know anything about Reverend Wheeler Parker is Ms. Cecil joined our department, and in passing, made the statement that one of her relatives was the cousin of Emmett Till. And I asked if was still alive and does he speak? And she said, yes, that’s what he does.
And so, that's how this whole thing came about. And just in that same timing in the whole spring semester, his book was released in January of 2023, and the name of this book is, “A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations of the Journey to Justice for My Cousin and Best Friend Emmett Till.” And then, also, in the spring semester, the blockbuster movie Till was released. So, there has been kind of a resurgence of interest in the story of Emmett Till and what happened to him.
Woods: And Reverend Parker, he’s an eyewitness to history, right?
Branson: Yes.
Cecil: Yes. Reverend Parker… this has so marked his life. He was one of the last witnesses. In fact, when they went to pull Emmett Till out of the house, he was the one woken up by the gun to say which one is it. Unfortunately, to the tragedy and being a part of the funeral. This being like… they fled Mississippi because of this incident and had to move to Chicago. They live outside of the Chicago area to this day because of this incident. He’s a witness, a living witness, to the terrible things that were happening in the South, and he has given voice and he's been a great advocate for the social justice movement through his Mamie Till and Emmett Till Advocacy Institute that they run. He’s still voicing the injustice. So, he is a part of history that I’m afraid is dying out, and I think it's so important for us to hear from these last living witnesses.
Woods: Okay, Dana, so tell us about the event. It’s this week, right?
Branson: It is. So, we're having a student event on campus from 1 – 3 p.m. on Wednesday (April 12), and then we have a community event on Thursday from 5 – 7 p.m. Both events are located in Dempster Hall Auditorium. The events are to bring Reverend Wheeler Parker to campus to talk about this history with Emmett Till. But, what we really want to focus on is not so much the historical information, while that's incredibly important, what we really want to focus on is why history is so important today and these inequalities that we continue to see today.
Woods: Dr. Dana Branson, Shay Cecil, thank you for being with us today.
Cecil: Thank you.
Branson: Thank you.