I was there the night Emmett Till was taken

Lives Less Ordinary

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.6 • 814 Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2023

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Wheeler Parker is Emmett Till's cousin and the last surviving witness to his abduction.

Emmett's brutal murder in Mississippi in 1955 sparked a wave of protest in America. The 14-year-old African American was lynched for whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, who recently died aged 88. Reverend Wheeler Parker was Emmett's cousin and was in the next room to him when he was kidnapped. The horrific events of that night have shaped Wheeler's life. We spoke to him before the news of Donham's death.

Wheeler has written a book alongside lawyer and journalist Christopher Benson called: A Few Days Full of Trouble. We spoke to them before the death of Carolyn Bryant Donham.

This programme contains some distressing scenes.

Presenter: Jo Fidgen Producer: Deiniol Buxton and Troy Holmes Editor: Munazza Khan

Transcript

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0:00.0	On a winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation.
0:06.9	It was an extraordinary news story.
0:09.1	The story of an aristocrat, Lord Lucan, who's said to have killed the family Nanny,
0:13.7	mistaking her for his wife, then somehow just disappeared.
0:18.0	One of the great mysteries in English criminal history.
0:20.7	We're still looking for Lucan.
0:22.1	It's honestly one of the most powerful stories of my lifetime.
0:25.9	I'm Alex von Tundselman.
0:27.3	This is The Lucan Obsession.
0:29.2	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:31.4	In order to understand the system you had to have lived it,
0:35.4	and they were law.
0:36.9	When you say they were law, who are you
0:38.6	referring to? The landowners, the storekeepers, the white people, they could do anything they
0:44.4	wanted. This is Reverend Wheeler Parker, born and raised in Mississippi at a time when there was
0:50.9	strict racial segregation. All the power was in the hands of white people
0:56.1	and black people were taught to know their place. You learn those so early that it was
1:03.6	such a common way of life. You never gave it much thought. You learned the southern mores.
1:09.4	What were those southern mores? Well, how to behave,
1:13.1	yes, sir, no sir. Wheeler was 16 years old in 1955 when his younger cousin, Emmett Till,
1:22.7	was murdered. He was with Emmett on the fateful day that he broke the rules of the South, and he was with
1:30.9	him three days later when two white men came to take him away. Wheeler fully expected to die
	...

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