Hey is Kadija. This episode will tell the story of how one incredibly dark moment in our country's history sparked a seventy year movement that we're still feeling the benefits of today. But in order to tell that story, we're going to be discussed in racially motivated violence and murder. If you are someone you love has been affected by any of the themes that come up in this episode, we left some links in the description that offer resources
and support. Take care of yourself. I Matil was a fourteen year old boy when he took a trip to visit his family in Money, Mississippi. It was nineteen fifty five. Much of the US was still in the era of Jim Crow's segregation. It was a time when violent racism was the norm and where one small bad encounter could ruin your life, which is what happened to Emmitt. After being accused of offending a white woman in a grocery store, he was abducted and lynched in a horrific case that
shocked America. You've probably heard his story before in high school lessons are Hollywood movies. You might have seen black and white photos of him and assumed it happened a long time ago, but the past is not as distant as it seems.
I am Marvelle McCain Parker, and I am the wife of Reverend Wheeler Parker, who is the last surviving eyewitness of the kidnapping of Emmitt Till. Not only was he and I witness to the kidnapping, but he and Emmitt from the age of seven. They grew up together.
They were cousins and best friends.
Emmett actually traveled to Mississippi with Wheeler, and Wheeler came home alone.
Doctor Parker's husband lost his childhood friend into a racist lynching, but Emmett's murders sparked a movement, a movement that continues to inspire me and Nikki and our activism and justice work.
The open casket funeral of Mmittil at Robert's Temple, Church of God in Christ is said to have been the catalysts that sparked the civil rights movement. Rosa park said when she refused to give her seat up on the bus that September of nineteen fifty five, that hot day, she refused to give up a seat, she thought about Mmittil, and she stayed in her seat and we know that that one act was the birth of the Montgomery bus boycott that brought doctor King of town, that gave birth
to the civil rights movement. Emmitt's death was the spark.
The civil rights movement started with a few ordinary but deeply passionate organizers determined to fight against the status quo regular people like you and me. In this episode, I'll be talking to doctor Parker about her remarkable life fighting for social change, and she'll share some of her top tips for how to rally your own community around the causes that you care about the most.
Oh God, I'm.
Kadida herdaway from the teens at Novel and iHeart Podcast. This is the girlfriends Untouchable by Guys Bonus, Episode five, sparking a movement, Doctor Parker, it is so lovely to see you and talk to you as always.
Good morning, Kadija. It's so nice to see you this Monday morning and to have this opportunity to share with you.
Doctor Parker has a long and story career. She's the executive director of the Imma Till and Maybe Till Mobley Institute. She graduated with a doctorate from Seminary School, wrote a book about the impact of HIV and AIDS on African American women and spent her life mentoring activists like me. But if you asked her what shaped her commitment to social justice work, she'll tell you it was the Till story and the pivotal role that played in the civil
rights movement. In nineteen fifty five, her husband, Wheeler Parker, then a teenager, and his friend Emmett Til traveled from Chicago to Mississippi visiting relatives for a summer vacation. The two boys were asleep when a group of men broke into the house they were staying in during the middle of the night. They came in with a gun and a flashlight, pulled Emmett out of the bed and dragged him away. It was the last time Wheeler saw him alive. The aftermath of the luncheon traumatized Wheeler.
For all of these years, he's had survivor's guilt, but he didn't want to talk about the story. It was such an unpleasant story to him, and living with the guilt that he came home and Emmett didn't. It was not something that he felt he wanted to visit every day or every week. Publicly, he didn't want any fame, any claim. He said, I'm not a hero, I'm a survivor. He sat back, he let Mami tell the story Maye being Emmett Till's mother. But eventually we decided to share
his perspective. He was convinced that he needed to write his book tell the authentic story. We haven't been asked by Mami before her death to ensure that the legacy of Mmititil was told in perpetuity.
Most things are catapulted by storytelling. In the case of Mtil, the story has been told in many different versions. I identified very much so with storytelling. When it comes to the work I've done in Windot County, it's pretty much what moves the needle. But I've also found that people have very strong desires, and the desires center around their ego and them wanting to tell their version of a story that may not even be true or even helpful
toward moving the needle for the entire project. Can you talk about that a little bit and how you navigated that.
Our goal was to make sure that the story was told truthfully, because the people that were being featured on CNN and other news outlets, some of them weren't even born when the story happened, and they told a distorted story. So we were just, I guess we were just forced to tell the true story because there were so many miles out there painting the picture and it was false.
So, alongside other friends, family and supporters of the Till family, Doctor Parker made it a part of her mission to ensure the true version of that story stayed alive.
Then twenty twenty one we created what is called the m Matil It Made Me Tell Mobiley Institute, and it was created to ensure that the story of Immittil is told correctly and truthfully, and that the resources that would be made available in order to erect or dedicate national sites to the memory of he and his mom were brought to fuition. So as exactly kative director of the Immitil and Maymi Till Mobili Institute, we were successful in
getting the sites dedicated as a national monument. President Joe Biden signed a proclamation creating the Immittill and Maymi Till Mobili National Monument with three sites. It is the first non contiguous national monument in the United States. The three sites are one Roberts Temple Church, of God in Christ in Chicago, where Immit's funeral was held. It is said that over one hundred thousand people passed by and viewed the mutilated body of the slain fourteen year old boy.
And the courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where the infamous trial was held and his confessed murderers were found not guilty by a jury of their peers. And the third site is gray Ball Landing where Emmitt's body was retrieved. So we are working now to restore the church to its nineteen fifty five facade. We've received two point nine one eight million dollar grant to begin that and that's ongoing.
We've been able to acquire property, the property where in its childhood home stood, and we memoralized that site, and we continue to advocate for the poor. So busy, busy, busy, busy.
But they didn't achieve that by just making the right calls and waiting for change to happen. Doctor Parker and those she worked alongside spent years building up a community of people to join their calls, a feat that would inspire me and the other women of Kansas City when it came to the challenge of trying to take detect the Roger Gluski down and after the break we'll look at ways you can spark that kind of change in
your community. When you see activists who have achieved incredible things like changing laws or sparking nationwide campaigns, it can be easy to think that you need to have it all figured out to make a meaningful difference, but you don't.
You just got to start with what you've got. We don't need money to accomplish the things that we're trying to accomplish. I tell people when they come to me to ask me about you know, how do we get funding? We want to do ABCD. I said, you get funding by doing ABCD, and then people will fund what you're doing. My husband and I we financed the organization for many many years. We provided the office space in our building, all of the office equipment, did all of the legal work.
Somebody's got to in kind their skills to help you accomplish your goal.
You remind me so much of the Rosa Parks story and how the NAACP got is footing, which in a lot of ways didn't have any income. But again they knew that they needed to make a change, and they organized and used their human capital to make that happen. How do you pick a good team that supplies the in kind donations or the kind service that we're talking about, that gives up their elbow grease and the sacrifice of what they actually want to see come out of it.
You look for key stakeholders, and for me, key stakeholders were people who lived in the community, worked in the community. They were stakeholders because their survival was dependent on the community surviving. A lot of times we try to bring in people who are not stakeholder, which means that they're not tied or linked to the issue or to the need, and so their human capital or their contribution could be fleeting.
They've here today and gone tomorrow. But key stakeholders are people that are going to benefit.
It's something doctor Parker also saw when she tried to create change in her town, Summit, Illinois.
The target was to make my community aware of the resources that they were entitled to that they weren't being able to access, and challenging the elected officials to be fair in distributing the resources. In the black community, the church is the anchor institution in the black community. So we began our first meeting with the pastors, made them aware of the problems and the issues we were facing and the need for us to come together as a community.
Our first community meeting, the meeting room could not hold all of the people that we listened to the residents, and we had created an agenda of issues that the community wanted to be heard about and that wanted to be answered. Then after we created the form of agenda items, then we ask them to prioritize, you know, everything. We can't do everything at once, so now tell us, you know, let's prioritize our needs and then let's begin to systematically
address them with the powers that be. So you might start off with a very small nucleus of people as key stakeholders, but as you begin to move forward and people become proactive in wanting to be involved, you will bring on people, and a small group of people deeply invested in their community can be pretty powerful community mobilization. Usually it begins with an issue that there's something that
needs to be addressed. In order to mobilize a community, we found that as long as everything was going smooth, you know, people don't have time to attend meetings, but you let something happen and everybody's ready to fight. Really, mobilization helps you to be able to address the issue as a community, which will bring your elected officials to the table because we know that every four years, every two years, there's an election, so mobilizing is important as
it relates to politics. That's how community mobilization paid off for my neighborhood. We now have senior housing, we got all of our new streets, new alleys. All of these resources were there, but they weren't being channeled to my neighborhood, which was the poorest neighborhood in the community and of course entitled to the resources, but they were going to other places. So community mobilization, where there's unity, their strength.
And if you're organized without anger and without animosity, you become a mover and shaker. And that's what happened in my time.
But what do you do when you're trying to organize in the midst of a tense political climate like the one we're living through right now. How do you form alliances with the people you don't see eye to eye with and a time when it feels more important than ever to fight for our civil liberties.
That's after the break I got you I got you. I got you.
I have always been told when it comes to making change, fundamentally, it literally only takes two to three people, But when it comes to actually moving that forward, it.
Takes the vote. It takes we the people.
If I can't get the people to come out and vote and stand and measure for that, then we have nothing.
I know, in my community, I.
Think only thirty percent of the population votes, and a very small percentage of that is black. How do we move the needle of voter registration and raise those percentages up across the country.
That's what I asked, doctor Parker. Our whole system of government is being challenged. I see no respect for the Constitution. I see no respect for the Supreme Court. I see absolutely no respect for the separation of powers. And it's frightening to me when you talk about voter registration and people getting out the vote. That is the biggest challenge to anybody that has ever run for office, because people
will not go out and vote. They say that vote doesn't matter or understand it why it's not important, especially for black people who, of course, one hundred years ago, I think women couldn't vote. And you know how long it took for our people to be able to vote in Mississippi in the South, and the things that they had to go through in order to be able to vote,
and how many people lost their lives. I mean, my grandmother's church was burned down in the sixties because the civil rights workers were having meetings there trying to teach people how to register the votes. We got this right to vote through blood, sweat and tears. Me Nicki and other activists I know often talk about what it takes to pull people out of apathy and inspire them to action. For some people, it takes a personal connection or crisis.
It's a multitude of things. For doctor Parker like her past experience and personal connections, but one of the constants that keeps her fighting is her faith. My husband and I are both third generation members of the Church of God in Christ, so we were raised in a Pentecostal family.
We were taught to live by the Gospels. But for him, he says that you know, it was his faith in God that allowed him to survive the ordeal that he went through because on that night when emmittt was kidnapped, he prayed to God to spare his life and to allow him to live and that he would serve him. And he has kept that vow. He has kept that vow and that commitment to God. I embrace his role in preserving the legacy of emmitt. Our faith in God helps us to endure the things that we've had to endure.
The theme of our work with immit Tell's story is love, forgiveness, and reconciliation. So you know, the Bible tells us, and I'm on my soapbox right now, the Bible tells us that we have to love our enemy. And I say to my students, if we have to love our enemy, who's left to hate nobody? Because we definitely love our brother and our sister, and our mother, and our father and our friends. He told us to love our neighbor as ourself. Then he tells us to love our enemy.
I'm like my God, who can I hate? He says, nobody. So hate is not even on the table. Now. It's a challenge to love your enemy. But doesn't mean I want to go to dinner with him or take a vacation with him. But I can't hate him. So hate is not an option. And because hate is not an option and love is commanded, of us. We have to dig deep within our soul and ask God to give us what he has told us we can do. He said we can love our enemy. So if he said we can do it, by golly we can do it.
We can do it. And the closing of my interrogation or my speech is to visitors to the monument, I say that my husband and I are in the twilight of our life, and you know, we've got to work the work of him that sent us whiles day, because the night coming when no man can work. And what I'm trying to do now is train younger women to carry on what I do and what I've done.
I often wonder what the future of Kansas City, Kansas will look like. Most of the victims and survivors never got justice will happen to them, and even the ideal of justice itself feels flawed.
What does justice.
Even look like when a woman has been killed or a family has been destroyed by the actions of one man who's not allied to face the consequences. Doctor Parker doesn't know, but in the case of Immittil, it's his legacy that remains.
This year, we celebrating seventy years since his death. His murder in money in Mississippi is kidnapping in money and his subsequent murder. We don't celebrate it because it's pleasant. It's an unpleasant event. But we celebrate his life because of what his life has contributed to all of America.
I have a picture of we the hold in the hand of Emmitt, the statue of Emmitt in Greenwood, Mississippi, which is about eighteen feet and he's holding his hand and he said, you're bigger in death than you would have been in life.
I just hope that the women of Kansas City whose lives were cut short are looked back on in the same way that the stories of their murders are used to shine a light on glucpi's crimes, and that their ongoing investigation exposes corruption. I hope that by continuing to tell these stories will inspire the people of Kansas City and beyond to fight back against the forces that seek to suppress and prey upon us. Thank you, doctor Parker for all your work that you've done. It's truly amazing
to see a lot of it come to fruition. I greatly appreciate not just hearing the words, but being able to watch you grow and expand knowledge and education around EMMIT TIL. To learn more about doctor Parker's work and activism, visit www dot doctor Marvell Parker dot net.
What an inspiring conversation.
I really admire doctor Parker's lifelong commitment to fighting against social injustice and preserving the part of our country's history that can be difficult to hear. It's more important than ever to fight back, So rally your community, mobilize them around the issues you care about, and get to work. Because no person, system, or form of oppression is ever truly untouchable when regular people like you and me come
together to make a change. In the next and final episode of The girlfriends Untouchable, I'll be having a conversation with the journalists to Mary Cherry about how survivors, families, and activists can use the media to put a spotlight on the injustice in their communities.
Here's a sneak peek.
You cannot adequately take care of yourself unless you take care of that person who's sharing their traumatic story, because you can be traumatized by the traumatic stories of others, and the best way to protect yourself from that is to support them in an ethical trauma informed way.
The Girlfriend's Untouchable is produced by Novel for iHeart podcast. For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio. This episode was hosted by me Kadija Hardaway. It was produced by Mohammad Ahmed and Referro Masurua. The editor is Joe Wheeler, the researcher is Aiyana Yusuf. Production management from Sharie Houston and Joe Savage. The fact checker is Vindo Fulton. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kempsen with additional engineering by
Nicholas Alexander. Music supervision by Refriro Mazurua, Nicholas Alexander and Joe Wheeler. Original music by Amanda Jones. The series artwork was designed by Christina Limku, Novels Director of Development in Selena Metta. Willard Foxton is Novel's creative director of Development. Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive producers for Novel.
Katrina Novo and Nikki Etour are the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts, and the marketing lead is Alison Kenttour And a special thanks to Carley Frankel and the whole team at w m E.
I got you, I got you. I got you, I got you.