Wheeler Parker (second from right), talks to Dundalk High English teacher Erica Dilland (right) for a segment on Dundalk’s cable program, What’s Going on Here? Parkville Middle School student Jamie Marshall (second from left) had interviewed Parker for a report assigned by her America’s Past teacher Leah Renzi (left).    photo by Bill Gates

E. Till’s cousin is interviewed for TV show

by Bill Gates

Wheeler Parker remembers that August day in 1955 when his 14-year-old cousin, Emmett Till, whistled at a white woman in a small Mississippi town.
    And he remembers lying in bed, terrified for his life, four days later when men entered his grandfather’s house in the middle of the night and took Emmett away at gunpoint.
    Till’s body was found three days later. The murder is often called the birth of the American civil rights movement.
    It’s an oft-recounted story. But, for the longest time, there was something missing from it.
    Parker’s viewpoint. Details from someone who was there.
    Which is part of how Parker came to be at Dundalk High School last Thursday, when he was interviewed for a segment on the school’s cable program, What’s Going on Here?
    “All the stories written about Emmett, and no one ever came to me,” Parker said to program hostess/English teacher Erica Dillard. “And I was there.
    “Someone has to tell the kids what really happened.”
    One of those “kids” is 13-year-old Jamie Marshall, a Nottingham resident and a student at Parkville Middle School.
    As an oral history project for her America’s Past class, Marshall wrote about Emmett Till. One of the requirements for the project was to speak to primary sources. Marshall found Parker.
    “I was reading a book about the civil rights movement,” said Marshall, an honor student in the eighth grade who is a member of the mass communications magnet program at Parkville Middle.
    “Emmett Till’s name was highlighted in the book, so I looked it up, saw photos of his body.”
    (Till’s family had his casket open at the funeral so everyone could see how badly Till had been brutalized by his murderers.)
    “A lot of the information out there [was conflicting],” Marshall said. “I wanted to determine which was the truth. I didn’t want to put a lot of false information into my project.
    “The most important thing I learned from Mr. Parker is that Emmett just whistled at the woman. I read that he had grabbed her around the waist, was showing her pictures. What really stood out to me is that he just whistled.”
    Leah Renzi, Marshall’s teacher for the America’s Past class, described the eighth-grader’s finished project as something you would see from a graduate student.
    “Jamie was very angry, after talking to primary sources, at how some of the secondary sources really got it wrong,” Renzi said.
    Marshall said she was surprised and happy with the result of her interview request. She had tracked down his Illinois telephone number and called him out of the blue.
    “I get a lot of calls,” said Parker, a pastor who travels the country speaking about Emmett. “[Marshall] showed a level of professionalism that made me forget I was talking to a 13-year-old. She was no-nonsense, right to the point.”
    Marshall conducted the interviews by telephone, recording them onto cassette tapes.
    Her mother, Brenda, approached Dundalk High technology chairman Tom Pless about transferring the recordings onto compact discs.
    She mentioned to Pless that Parker was coming to Maryland and had contacted her daughter so he could meet her personally.
    Pless, who oversees the television production studio at Dundalk High, offered to have Marshall, Parker and Renzi appear on the school’s cable program.
    “I thought it was a good idea,” Parker said after last week’s taping. “Anything to help students, to help the area of history, I don’t mind doing.”

‘An amazing soul’
    As he took his seat on the What’s Going on Here? set, Parker looked around, impressed, and said “This is quite a setup you have here. I did 60 Minutes on CBS and they didn’t have this kind of space. We were cramped.”
    Dillard, who teaches English 12 and is the faculty advisor to the school yearbook, said she had a difficult time preparing to interview Marshall and Parker.
    “I was actually nervous today, and I’m never nervous,” she said afterward. “I teared up a couple of times. I had to really think about my emotions.
    “It was truly an honor to talk to [Parker]. What an amazing soul he is.”
    A man of quiet dignity and grace, Parker was in Baltimore last week to attend a U.S. Department of Justice program called the Weed and Seed Initiative.
    The program attempts to weed out violent crime, gang activity and drug use in targeted neighborhoods, then seed it with social and economic revitalization.
    “I’m supposed to be in class right now,” Parker said. “I’ll get [to] it in the morning.”

Incident at the general store
    Parker described his cousin as a fun-loving kid who was never dull to be around and loved to play practical jokes.
    That didn’t matter in Till’s hometown Chicago. The deep South in 1955 was another matter.
    “His family didn’t want Emmett to visit Mississippi,” Parker said. “They knew his nature would be out of place there.”
    Nothing happened inside the general store, said Parker, who was 16. The three boys had left and were standing outside when the store’s proprietor walked out.
    Till gave her an appreciative whistle, Parker said, “and it was like someone had thrown a rock and broke a window. We hopped in the car and drove off.”
    They agreed not to tell any of their grown relatives what had happened, and “being teenagers,” forgot about the incident, Parker said.
    Until four days later, when Parker was awakened at 2 a.m. by voices demanding the “fat boy from Chicago.”
    “There was a man with a gun and a flashlight,” Parker said. “Fear just gripped me. I was getting ready to die. They found Emmett, and there was a lot of commotion. My granfather tried to pay them money, but they wouldn’t take money. They said they would bring [Emmett] back.”
    Fearing the men would come back for Parker, his family put him on a train for Memphis and he eventually reached Chicago.
    Differing accounts claim Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant inside the store; that he grabbed her hand and asked for a date; that he said “Bye, baby” as he left the store.
    Bryant herself reportedly claimed Till grabbed her by the waist and used “unprintable” words.
    Accounts also claim Bryant’s husband, Roy, along with two other men, knocked on the door of Parker’s grandfather’s house, asked to see the teens and took Emmett away after he was brought to the door and identified by Carolyn Bryant.
    “There are so many stories out there,” Parker said. “When I come along and tell the truth, people are, like, ‘Are you sure?’ Or it’s written as ‘Wheeler Parker alleges ... .’”
    Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milan, stood trial and were acquitted; both men later confessed they had murdered Till.
    Both men have since died of cancer, Milan in 1980 and Bryant in 1994.
    Parker, who said Till “speaks louder in death than he would if he had lived,” does not hold grudges.
    “I’m not here to stir up animosity or ill will,” he said during the program. “But history isn’t pretty all the time. If we don’t remember history, we’re subject to repeating it. We need to remember these things, see where they came from, what needed to be changed.
    “The color thing is so asinine. All it is, is color. How can just the color of your skin mean anything?”

•    The What’s Going on Here? program featuring Wheeler Parker will be shown on Baltimore County cable channel 73 (Comcast) and channel 35 (FiOS) throughout April (for show times, go to www.bcps.org/apps/edchannel_schedule/).