Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr. - A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice for My Cousin and Best Friend, Emmett Till

July 12, 2018. Breaking news. The Associated Press was first with the story, which moved across the media and into public attention like wildfire. US Reopens Emmett Till Investigation, Almost 63 Years After His Murder.

According to this story and the others that followed, the FBI had reopened the Emmett Till murder investigationan investigation conducted between 2004 and 2006 looking into a grisly lynching that had occurred in 1955. There was no conviction in the 1955 murder trial. No indictments handed down by a Mississippi grand jury in 2007, after that part of the FBI investigation. No more hope for justice. The cold case had grown even colder, and it seemed like nobody ever would answer for Emmett.

Now in July 2018, according to the news, things were heating up all over again. Reportedly, renewed government interest in the case was connected to new information, most likely a revelation published in a book by Duke University senior scholar Timothy Tyson.

The book claimed that Carolyn Bryant Donham now admitted she told a lie on Emmett Tilla lie that had cost him his life on August 28, 1955.

The quality of the reporting now was different from the reporting I had endured for nearly sixty-three yearsreporting that had carried mistakes, misinterpretation, misrepresentation, and very often seemed to validate her lie if only by repeating so much of it. The horrible loss of my cousin, my best friend, had been made all the more painful because of the distorted narratives I had been forced to read and hear over the course of three generations. Now there would be new action, according to stories reported with greater care and context by the AP, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and echoed by so many other conversations. And we, the family of Emmett Till, responded for the record.

Its a prayer come true for her to recant, I told The Washington Post.

What I knew at the time of the July 2018 reports, however, was what only a few other people knew. Four things, really. First, the Emmett Till case launched by the federal government in 2004 never had been closednot completely, anyway. Several years of research, interviews, document analysis, an autopsy, and a grand jury inquiry, and no conclusion. So the dormant caseat least the FBI investigationreally hadnt been reopened in 2018 as reported. Maybe just reawakened, nudged a little.

Second, while this latest phase of the investigation was news in the summer of 2018, the information presented by the stories actually had been revealed in a federal report earlier and published on the US Department of Justice website that year, in March, four months before the media reports were published. There it was on page 17 in part 2 of the DOJ report following references to two other cases the department had opened: The Department has re-opened In re Emmett Till, a case which had been listed as closed on prior Reports, after receiving new information. This boring bureaucratic blurb had gone unnoticed at first, as it was just a routine checklist item resting there in a quiet space halfway through the report. Now, four months later, it was reported as breaking news. But even more, that March announcement came a year after several surviving Till family members and I had attended a meeting with government officials in Oxford, Mississippia meeting to discuss the case, to consider a way forward. And in that meeting, federal and state officials told the family elders what they planned to do, after hearing what we wanted them to do. So, this was hardly news to us. This came as no surprise to members of the family, cousin Airickca Gordon-Taylor told The Washington Post.

Third, the July 2018 media reports pointed to the investigations potential focus on Carolyn Bryant Donham, who, years earlier as Carolyn Bryant, had been at the center of it allthe lies that led to Emmetts brutal lynching, the lies that framed him and provided the justification for his murder in the racist culture of the Mississippi Delta. Still, she only represented half of the equation. For quite some time, I had known about the other halfa revelation hidden inside a revelationand had promised to keep quiet while the government investigators and lawyers looked into every aspect of it. Not even all our family members could know that other part, given concerns that any leak could affect the outcome.

Fourth, the way forward in this latest phase of the investigationthe reawakening, the nudgingwas what some people might call ironic. I prefer to call it divine intervention. You see, in a very important way, it all was made possible by Emmett Till. His death inspired the law that gave new life to the murder investigationthe Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act.

This book is about all thatall that and then some. It presents a multidimensional search for justice stretching back to Emmetts murder. It presents my personal story, that of a survivor of the night of terrorAugust 28, 1955when Emmett Till, our beloved Bobo, was taken from us. It presents an emotional experience, one Ive spent sixty-seven years suppressing. And it presents a process toward healing, one I share with so many family survivors of horrific spectaclesthe photographed lynchings of the last century by criminals in hoods, and todays video-recorded murders executed by criminals with badges.

I have come to recognize that the story of Emmett Till is larger than Emmett Till himself. Larger and longer lasting than even our familys cries for justice. It is the story of power, and the way that power is used to put Black people in our place in society. The way it is used to keep us there. The way it is used to punish us when we step out of our assigned place. Bird-watching in Central Park. Or yes, this too, pulling a childish prank at a tiny store in Money, Mississippi.

The story of Emmett Till, today, is also about power over the story itselfthe way the story is told and who gets to tell it. Sadly, so many storytellers have seemed more interested in appropriating the story, making it their own, and elevating themselves as heroes somehow just for telling it. I am taking back the power to define it, to tell it, to preserve it as best I can. After all these years, Bobos truth has not been toldnot completely, anyway. This book is an attempt to accomplish that. And in that, to achieve some measure of justice, if only because we clear the record of so many errors and out-and-out lies in a number of the stories about Bobothe Emmett Till I knew so well.