The Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., is the last living eyewitness to the lynching of Emmett Till and the incident at a grocery store that triggered two white supremacists in Mississippi to brutally murder the 14-year-old Black Chicago youth.
Monday marks the 68th anniversary of Till’s Aug. 28, 1955, lynching. Till’s mutilated body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River on Aug. 31, 1955, with barbed wire around his neck attached to a cotton gin fan weighing 70 pounds.
That summer of 1955, Parker, 16 and Till, 14 — cousins and close friends — took the Illinois Central’s City of New Orleans train south from Chicago to visit and stay with relatives in rural Mississippi.
