Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. speaks in Lawrence on Emmett Till’s 1955 lynching murder
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LAWRENCE, Kan. — A man who continues to fight for social justice and racial healing, after his childhood best friend was killed, is in Lawrence, Kansas Wednesday night.
Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. tells his story at the Spencer Museum of Art, continuing to push for justice and equality.
“I was an eye witness. For 30 years no one was interested, knowing what I had experienced,” he said.
That experience “Let the World See” now laid out in pictures, videos and stories.
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Parker was just 16 when he witnessed “the whistle” and kidnapping of his cousin and childhood best friend in 1955, when Emmett Till was killed.
They were vising family in Mississippi. Parker said Till was a prankster, who loved to make people laugh. Outside a store, Parker said Till whistled at a white shopkeeper.
“When he wolf whistled, if we could have disappeared into the earth we would have. We knew the south, we knew the people of the south. Some people still say he must’ve done something. He didn’t have to do anything. People got killed and hung for a reckless eyeball,” he said.
They left and Parker said a car sped after them. The teens jumped out of the car and ran through a field. The car passed but Parker remembers one girl saying this isn’t over.
Days later, he heard people outside their house at 2:30 in the morning.
“I hear these people talking, pretty soon they’re coming my way, and they entered my room no lights anywhere,” he said. “Dark as a thousand midnights, with a pistol in one hand, and a flashlight in the other. I closed my eyes to die, to be shot and I opened my eyes and I hadn’t been shot.”
Parker said they went on to find Till in the third room. He was kidnapped, tortured and lynched.
Till’s death sparked change throughout the country, fueling the Civil Rights movement in the years afterward. But Parker said there’s still more to do.
“They can take the message and stand up for what’s right, regardless,” he said.
Parker walks through the exhibit, struck by pictures throughout his past.
One of the pictures is of Mamie at her 14-year-old son’s funeral.
“She said let the world see but she closed her eyes,” he said.
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It’s an immersive experience. From the phone, visitors can pick up and hear Parker’s testimony, to sitting in front of the memorial sign now sprayed with bullets. It was installed in 2018, where Till’s body was pulled from the river.
“You don’t want to ever experience anything like that in your life, you feel so helpless and your grandfather and nobody can help you but God,” Parker said. “So you pray to God just let me live, please let me live.”
The exhibit will be in Lawrence through May 19.
The Spencer Museum of Art is live streaming the event Wednesday with Parker at 6 p.m.
