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The Rev. Wheeler Parker, 85, was a 16-year-old Chicago resident on vacation during August 1955 in the Mississippi Delta when friend and cousin Emmett Till wolf whistled at a white woman. Within days he was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by two white men who were acquitted by an all-white jury but subsequently confessed to the crimes. (Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector) -
The Rev. Wheeler Parker said the murder of Emmett Till, 14, by white supremacists in Mississippi reignited the civil rights movement in 1955. This bullet-riddled sign marked the spot Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. Parker says the vandalism tells a story about race relations. (Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector) -
Sydney Pursel, curator of public practice at Spencer Museum of Art at University of Kansas, the Rev. Wheeler Parker and Dave Tell, a KU professor of communication studies, discuss art and historical exhibits at Spencer Museum tied to the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. (Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector) -
The Rev. Wheeler Parker, a cousin of murdered teen Emmett Till, said the 1955 homicide committed by Mississippi racists invigorated the U.S. civil rights movement and continued almost 70 years later to offer perspective on how the nation had progressed on race relations. (Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector)
Rev. Wheeler Parker Honors Friend, Cousin with Traveling Exhibit, Artwork
LAWRENCE — Black teenagers Wheeler Parker and Emmett Till were on vacation from Chicago when they stepped into the white-owned Mississippi Delta grocery store operated by Roy and Carolyn Bryant to buy candy in the summer of 1955.
In a region saturated with influences of the Ku Klux Klan and in rural towns organized around…
