News

Aug 12, 2023

Rev. Wheeler Parker's Trip to The White House for the Emmett Till Monument Ceremony

It took us 13 hours to drive Rev. Wheeler Parker, Till's cousin, to the White House for this week's historic ceremony. With the help of a sportswriter, a sprinter van, and a bag of peanuts, we made

It took us 13 hours to drive Rev. Wheeler Parker, Till's cousin, to the White House for this week's historic ceremony. With the help of a sportswriter, a sprinter van, and a bag of peanuts, we made it.

On Tuesday, July 18, Patrick Weems got a call from an official at the Department of the Interior. President Biden, the official told Weems, was planning to designate three sites as a National Monument in honor of Emmett Till—in just a few days.

Weems is the executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, an educational museum in Sumner, Mississippi, near the spot where Till was tortured and murdered in 1955 at the age of 14 after whistling at a white woman. Since 2017 Weems been campaigning to create a National Park in Till’s honor. This was the call he had been waiting for.

There was suddenly a lot to do. Weems would have to get to Washington, but—more important—so would Rev. Wheeler Parker, Jr., who was Emmett Till’s cousin and best friend, and the last eyewitness to Till’s abduction.

Weems’s phone rang again: This time it was Dr. Marvel Parker, calling from Chicago, Wheeler’s wife—and the executive director of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Institute. For the past seven years she had worked with Weems to lobby for the monument. She was also on the call with the Interior, but she now had bad news: Wheeler couldn’t make the trip. At 84, the reverend was not strong enough to fly to Washington.

Wheeler Parker is a humble man. He told himself that he didn’t have to be there for the proclamation—it could happen without him. But in fact, he was heartbroken. From the day his cousin Emmett was murdered, so many people had lied about what happened in attempts to cover up the murder, twisting the story in unconscionable ways. Parker had spent his life fighting to tell the truth, and now he was going to miss the moment when the president of the United States would help him win that fight.

Weems thought to himself: No way.

The thing you’ve got to know about Wright Thompson is that he goes big. He doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t overthink, is undeterred by the possibility of failure. He’s a big man, with a big beard and a deep, big voice drenched in his native Mississippi. Most important, he has a big heart. You call Wright when you need help, which is why Weems called him.

Another reason: In 2021 Thompson wrote the definitive essay about the barn Till was tortured in, cementing Thompson’s place in the line of distinguished tellers of Till’s story. The plan: Weems and Thompson would meet in Chicago, rent a car, and drive Parker to Washington for the ceremony.

With Thompson on board, Weems called Marvel to pitch the idea to her, and she then pitched it to her husband.

But why, Wheeler asked his wife, would these two men fly to Chicago to then drive to Washington?

“Because they love you,” she said.

I teach at the University of Kansas, and in 2019 I published Remembering Emmett Till, an account of the attempts over the years to memorialize Till’s story—a book that earned me a place in the Weems-Till universe. Weems called me at 2 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, two days before the ceremony at the White House. I thought he was calling to convince me to fly to Washington within 48 hours. Instead he asked if I could get to Chicago by 7 the next morning. After a 2:30 a.m. wake-up call and a 57-minute flight, I was on the ground at Midway by 6:30 Monday morning.

After a fifteen-minute Uber ride, I arrived at the Parkers’ home, where I found Thompson, Weems, and our transport. Thompson had (of course) found it: a black Mercedes Sprinter van that he picked up from a rental lot at an abandoned high school on the outskirts of O’Hare. By 7 a.m. we had loaded our luggage in the back, Thompson was behind the wheel, and the Parkers emerged from their house, Wheeler carrying a faded red garment bag. Dr. Parker (who would be flying to Washington) had packed sandwiches and reminded us to keep her husband hydrated.

Parker, conserving energy for what would be a 13-hour, 700-mile trip, fell asleep only a few minutes in—even before we reached Hyde Park, where we picked up the fifth and final member of our band, Christopher Benson. Benson, a professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, may know the Till family better than anyone. In 2003, after six months of conversations with Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, in her kitchen, he coauthored her memoir, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America. Twenty years later he coauthored Wheeler Parker’s memoir, A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice for My Cousin and Best Friend, Emmett Till. It was released six months ago.

Finally, we were off. It was July 24, one day after Wheeler and Marvel Parker celebrated their fifty-sixth wedding anniversary, and one day before what would have been Emmett Till’s eighty-second birthday.

It was somewhere around Gary, Indiana, that Thompson shot me a sudden look of panic.

“We don’t have credentials,” he said, his eyes wide, his voice quietly terrifying.

Um. Right. Parker, of course, needed no press credentials to enter the White House—he was the president’s special guest. Weems and Benson had theirs, and while our true mission was simply getting Reverend Parker to Washington, the chance to witness the historic signing meant a lot to all of us.

Thompson, still driving, started working his phone like a bookie, lining up assignments for himself and for me (the very story you are reading) and penetrating the White House switchboard to leave a message with the White House Press Office.

We crossed the border into Ohio and pulled into a truck stop for lunch.

Parker, now awake and alert and telling stories both moving and hilarious, lifted his frame out of the van and ambled into the minimart in search of peanuts and some kind of vegetable. Inside, he struck up a conversation with a group of motorcyclists—he used to ride plenty back in the day, he told them. I found myself wishing that people recognized him and knew where we were going. Here was this old man—his story a part of one of the most heinous crimes and one of the most shameful events in all of American history, on his way to meet the president—shaking a bag of Planters’ and talking horsepower with some biker dudes, none of them having any idea who he was.

This country, man.

Back in the van, while waiting for the gas tank to be filled, snacks to be purchased, and leaks to be taken, Benson thumbed the voice-recorder on his phone. As Parker settled back into the captain’s chair just inside the van’s sliding door, Benson’s journalistic instinct took over for a moment, and he asked permission to interview Parker, who nodded.

The van door open, Benson stood in the parking lot, holding his phone up. They talked for just a few minutes, but they were precious minutes. Parker said he would be the one to introduce President Biden at the ceremony the next day, which I had not known. He talked about the progress that had been made cementing his cousin’s place in history, but he was aware of the fragility of that progress. He confided that he had desperately wanted to see a national memorial created in his lifetime, but in recent years, especially when Donald Trump was president, he doubted he ever would.

“But here I am, sitting,” he said. “Experiencing history.”

As we made our way down the turnpike with two boxes of A Few Days of Trouble in the back of the van, I asked Chris what he learned by writing two Till-family memoirs in the space of twenty years. He stressed how painful it was for both Till-Mobley and Parker when the Till story was exploited. For Till-Mobley, the worst were the people who used her speaking engagements to line their own pockets. For Parker, he said, it was people who seemed to care more about their own notoriety than the truth.

The soybeans and corn of the upper-Midwest soon gave way to the rolling forests of Pennsylvania. At 2 p.m. the White House Press Office called Thompson back, and as the van barreled down I-70, he and I submitted our requests using our WiFi hotspot. Everyone looked relieved, especially Weems, who, as our team captain, would have felt pretty bad if two of his guys didn’t make it in.

Of course, we weren’t in yet.

I first met Weems in 2014 when he hosted a two-day summit on how to tell the Till story in the context of vandalism. Signs erected by the Interpretive Center were being vandalized with startling consistency. At Graball Landing—the site where Till’s body was pulled from the water and part of the new National Park—the vandalism was so persistent that, in 2019, Weems and I worked with the Parkers to create the country’s only bullet-proof roadside marker. The vandalism was a visceral reminder of how hard it had been to preserve the truth, but the sign—composed of half-inch AR500 steel and a .75-inch replaceable polycarbonate plate—was a reminder of the community’s commitment to doing so.

Until the week of the Till event in Washington, Graball Landing was owned by a man named Walker Sturdivant. Although the Sturdivant family was not involved in Till’s murder, in 1955 they also held the title to the barn where Till was tortured. (They were unknowingly leasing it to the murderers.) Sixty-eight years later, on Tuesday, July 18, Sturdivant signed the title for Graball Landing over to the National Park Service. The moment he did so, vandalism at Graball Landing became a felony. Their land was once used for evil without the family’s knowledge; at their direction, it would now be used for good.

Sturdivant signed the papers in the law office of the late Harvey Henderson, one of five white lawyers who, in 1955, buried the truth and ensured that the murderers walked free. Sturdivant was undoing Henderson’s lies in his own office.

The ceremony was at noon, but the interviews started over breakfast and we had to be rolling by 10. We were all supposed to be at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building by 11:30, but the Parkers had a White House tour before that. Thompson got up, showered, and was somehow outside a Men’s Warehouse at 9:30 when it opened. He purchased a sport coat, three shirts, a tie, and a pocket square for Wheeler, plus a belt for Weems. He was back at the hotel before I finished breakfast.

Thompson and I were looking at our phones more often than most teenagers do, checking to see if our credentials had come through. Just before 10 a.m., word arrived, and not a minute too soon: We were in. Thompson, Benson, Weems, and I would all have the honor of accompanying Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr. to the White House, sixty-eight years after he saw his cousin for the last time, back when white men could lynch a Black child and get away with it. Fifty-three years before a Black man could be elected president, before that president’s vice president would ascend to the Oval Office and welcome Wheeler Parker, age of 84, as his guest.

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This is sometimes how America works. The shame of injustice takes years, and often decades, to fade away, leaving the space we need to see it, to reckon with it, and to accept it—publicly, officially—as a part of who we are. Four Black girls died when members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963; it wasn’t designated a National Monument until 2017, by President Barack Obama. More than 13,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned at the Minidoka War Relocation Center, a concentration camp on U.S. soil, between 1942 and 1945; it was finally named a National Historic Site in 2001, by President Bill Clinton.

And yet for all the decades of frustration and work, when it happens, there is joy—I would describe the day of the signing as a joyful one. It’s a strange kind of joy, marred by the thing that set it into motion, but that’s the word.

While the Parkers had a private meeting with President Biden in the Oval Office, Thompson and I (and our press badges) waited in the Briefing Room—the one you see on TV, in press conferences. It was tiny and crowded. The carpet had been replaced the day before and some of the regular pool reporters said how nice the place looked. I ended up in a seat normally reserved for the Al Jazeera network. Weems was closer to the front, and Benson was with the family in the front row, just a few seats from Vice President Harris.

The best moment of the ceremony at which Biden signed the order creating the monument was the very beginning: Biden, Harris, and Rev. Wheeler Park, Jr. all entered together through double doors as the speakers blared “Hail to the Chief.” Parker looked regal, a million years and a million miles from August 28, 1955, in Drew, Mississippi.

After the ceremony, the hallway was a jumble of people, and Thompson and I got separated from our minder. We had pink press passes, which meant we required an escort at all times—someone with a blue pass. But we saw some folks from Mississippi and got to talking, and…our guy was nowhere to be found. The Secret Service made us wait for an escort before we could walk across the lawn and out the gate to Lafayette Square. The reception began an hour later.

Wine in plastic cups, finger food, people bumping into you—it was a reception. Towards the end I sat next to Reverend Parker in the plush chairs of the DOI’s library. Still wearing his new tie and pocket square, he was relaxed and enjoying a conversation with Fatima Curry, executive producer of Let the World See, a three-part documentary about the Till murder.

Even at 84, after a long day of public appearances, Parker didn’t look tired. He had the confidence and spark that can only come from a deep sense of peace. He had been fighting for his whole adult life to protect the story of Emmett Till. The story was less fragile than it had been that morning.

I asked him how the experience of having the National Monument for his cousin compared to other milestones for the Till story, of which there has been no shortage—the last two years alone have seen a six-part ABC miniseries, a feature-length film, a primetime documentary, a new Smithsonian exhibition, and a million-dollar travelling exhibit.

The National Monument, Parker told me, was “the least likely but the most meaningful.” More than a movie or a museum exhibit, the three-site national monument had the power to safeguard the story for generations. For Wheeler Parker, truth was the path to reconciliation. Maybe even justice. Certainly acceptance.

I looked over at Thompson, deep in some animated conversation, wine sloshing in his cup; at Benson, who channeled the words of Emmett’s mother and, later, his cousin; at Weems, for whom the preservation of Till’s story was his daily work. And I looked at Parker, next to me, serene. In the Christian gospel of Mark, there is a story of four friends carrying a paralyzed man to Jesus to be healed. Our trip didn’t end with a physical healing, but it did seem as if Wheeler’s soul was resting a bit more peacefully. My experience in the van made me wonder if the four men who carried the paralytic also experienced a kind of healing. I wondered if the men found themselves bonded to each other all the more deeply, not because of any feeling of pride or glory, but simply because they carried a person who knew he could not make it alone.

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