GREENWOOD, Miss.—It’s raining. Hard enough to hear the pitter-patter on the umbrellas of onlookers. Soft enough to play background to the Amtrak’s song.
Choo choo.
The railroad tracks are soaked with tears falling from the sky. Crying. Cleansing. Christening the space for passengers. The train doors slide back. A towering figure appears in the doorway. Caramel hands grab luggage bags and place them on the pavement with a sense of familiarity, a dark déjà vu.
Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. stands on the same concrete slab that he and his cousin, Emmett Louis Till, stood on 70 years ago. The last living eyewitness to Till’s abduction, Parker’s return to Greenwood resurfaces a national tragedy that had an impermeable mark on the Civil Rights Movement. His return is a gruesome reminder of the last time he saw his cousin, Emmett Till, alive.
Accompanying Rev. Parker is his wife, Dr. Marvel Parker, Juliet Louis (widow to Willie Reed, the eyewitness who testified to the Till murder in court), and Mike Small, an educator and family friend of Mamie Till-Mobley. The Emmett Till Interpretive Center organized the visit with additional support from the National Parks Conservation Association. Jessie Jaynes-Diming, special projects coordinator, and Patrick Weems, executive director of the Till Center, are also in attendance.
The train ride to Mississippi retraces the sites of historical pain and resistance since the murder of Emmett Till. The 14-year-old Till, a child from Chicago, was visiting his family in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955 when Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, accused him of whistling at her. Two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, would later confess to murdering him in response to those accusations only after an all-white jury found them not guilty.
Seven decades later, this ride paints a picture of the work that has been done since 1950 and the work that continues in today’s activism.
A Reception to Remember
Treading through the rain that nourishes the Delta landscape, the passengers make their way to the Alluvian Hotel in historic downtown Greenwood. They enter the heavy metal doors as honored guests. As activists. As nobles. Making their way across the cozy carpet and past eclectic Southern art, the passengers are served breakfast and met with a warm welcome from local dignitaries and admirers.
Mayor Kenderick Cox, the first Black male mayor of Greenwood, is one of the people to open up the morning reception. He mentions how honored he is to be sitting in the room with people who have dedicated their lives to such necessary work.
“You all inspire me to persevere through the hurdles that I face as mayor,” Cox said.
As conversations bounced around the topics of historical events and figures, untold and lesser-known stories of activism and alliance filled the room. Dr. Marvel Parker expressed how the notoriety of her husband and his work has invited both positive and negative attention.
“He has received death threats. He has received hate mail. Everybody doesn’t honor him as a hero,” Dr. Parker said.
In spite of such hateful acts, the family is still greeted with global admiration.
“People from all over the world come to our church to visit, to meet Reverend Parker. It’s not unusual on a Sunday morning to have someone from Germany that has found the church and found him and wants to meet him. He’s a great man,” his wife added.
A Lasting Legacy
Juliet Louis spoke about her late husband’s legacy and the courage that it took for Willie Reed to testify in court during the murder trial for Emmett Till. An 18-year-old from Greenwood, Reed and a young lady were at a well when he heard Till´s screams coming from a nearby barn.
“It’s my first time down here in my husband’s home state. He was the young boy at that time that heard Emmett hollering in that barn. He never got over that, really and truly he never did. It kind of bothers me to talk about it myself,” Louis said.
Roy Bryant, the husband of Carolyn Bryant, and his half brother—J.W. Milam—kidnapped Till and took Till to a nearby barn and brutally beat him to death.
“He actually heard the screaming, and he said Bryant came out and asked him if they heard anything, and he said no. He said he had a gun,” she remembered.
Louis knows this land only through memories passed along to her by her husband. A scared young man, Reed fled to Chicago after testifying in the Till trial and changed his name to Willie Louis. With a stern warning from his grandfather, Reed did not reveal his full identity to his wife until seven years into their marriage.
“When they got back to the house, his grandfather told him, ‘Don’t you ever say anything. What you heard, what you saw, don’t ever anything,’” Louis recollected.
“I did not know that he was the boy that had testified and been through all that. It was like seven years after we had been married,” she said.
Louis also shared that her husband was constantly burdened with the remembrance of the murder of Emmett Till.
“He never talked about it. When he came from down here back to Chicago, he had a nervous breakdown. He was in the hospital for a while,” Louis mentioned.
Traveling to other historic locations with the group, Louis learned the ways in which the Mississippi Delta has worked to right its wrongs by preserving the history and activism of the Civil Rights era. When visiting the Mound Bayou Museum of African American Culture and History, Louis found a picture of her husband that she had never seen before. She walked to the wall. Touched his tall, slender frame. And wept.
Reed’s train ride to Greenwood, Mississippi, was a beautifully painful reminder of her husband’s legacy and courage in the trial over Emmett Till’s murder. She continues his legacy by sharing his story from the Cotton Capital of the World all the way to the Windy City of Chicago.
Braxton Wheeler Thomas, a young lady from Tupelo, attended the welcoming reception. An alum of both Millsaps College and the University of Mississippi, the historian and juris doctor candidate at Mitchell Hamline School of Law felt awe as she listened to the guests’ tales.
“I’m just honored to be here, especially as a history major. Just to be in the room with so many giants and hearing their stories and firsthand accounts of their relationship and remembrance of Emmett Till,” Thomas said.