“Emmett loved life. He was bigger than life,” says his cousin, Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. Parker, who was with Emmett right before he was murdered. Here’s his account of what happened in late August 1955.
On Wednesday, August 24, the boys went to a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Parker was 16 and knew that any real or suspected violation of the South's racial social order was dangerous. He fondly remembers the cousin he called “Bobo” as someone who loved to make people laugh.
As Emmett was leaving the store, he let off a wolf whistle at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. Parker immediately knew they had to get away. Before sunrise on Sunday, August 28, white men came to the Parker house demanding to see the boy who’d whistled.
“I’m getting ready to die. These people are gonna kill us,” Parker thought. But they went past him and into the room where Emmett was, and took him away. He never saw Emmet alive again.
“I tell this story of Emmett because it depicts the South, and the best thing we can do is acknowledge that it did happen,” Parker recounted in his account captured in For the Record, a Black history archive by PushBlack and Capital B. “Even now, there are those who try to say that he must have done something, and that whitewashes history or relieves America of its guilt. They want us to stop telling those stories. But every Black family in the South has a story to tell — believe me.”
To discover more stories like this, check out For the Record, a national Black oral history project dedicated to preserving the stories, memories, and voices of Black America created by Capital B and PushBlack. Add your story to the archive today.