The 70th anniversary of Emmett Till’s death is being marked by family, friends and officials Wednesday as they repeated the fateful train ride he took from Chicago to Mississippi in 1955.
The ride is organized by the Emmett Till Interpretive Center and National Parks Conservation Association. Among the passengers will be Rev. Wheeler Parker, Jr., Till’s cousin and the last surviving eyewitness to his kidnapping, his wife Dr. Marvel Parker, and Juliet Louis, the widow of sharecropper Willie Reed who reported Till’s death and testified at the trial of his murderers.
The Amtrak City of New Orleans left Chicago’s Union Station at 8:05 p.m. Wednesday night, following a communal prayer. It will arrive in Greenwood, Mississippi, on Thursday morning, which is the 70th anniversary of Till’s death.
Back in 1955, the Rev. Parker and his cousin Till were just teenagers. They jumped on a train together from Union Station to Mississippi to visit family — but only one of them returned alive.
While in Mississippi, Till, 14 at the time, was kidnapped in the dead of night and then brutally lynched after reportedly whitling at a white woman.
Parker was in the house when Till was taken by white men at gunpoint.
“They came to me first in this room,” Parker recalled in 2021. “And I was shaking like a leaf on a tree.”
When Till’s badly decomposed body was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River, his mother Mamie Till refused to allow a quick burial and instead brought his remains back to Chicago, where she insisted on an open casket funeral.
That open casket funeral, and photos from it which were printed in newspapers nationwide, are credited with sparking the modern-day Civil Rights Movement.
Seventy years later, Parker boarded a train with a purpose.
“There’s a saying in the Bible, ‘Less thou forget,'” he said. ‘It helps us to remember.”
As Parker took the solemn ride, he said it is essential never to forget.
“For one thing, 70 years ago, we didn’t think about what was going to happen,” said Wheeler.
What did happen was that Till’s lynchers, Roy Bryant and John Milam, were tried and acquitted by a jury. The woman at the center of the whistling allegations, Carolyn Bryant, confessed decades later to historian Timothy Tyson that her allegations against the teenager were false.
“We’re not here to stir up animosity or hate, but to remind people of how far we’ve come and how much progress we’ve made,” said Wheeler.
While 70 years have passed, Till’s family said America still has healing to do.
“I’m always reminded of the suffering and price that he paid, but we’ve come a long way — and his mother’s statement was, ‘I hope he didn’t die in vain,'” said Wheeler. “He didn’t die in vain.”
Along for the ride on the train was the widow of Willie Reed, the man who publicly identified Till’s killers in court — in a first for a Black man during the Jim Crow era.
The family has much on which to reflect on the long train ride.
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