A Few Days Full of Trouble

In a hypnotic interplay between uncovered facts and vivid recall, the last surviving eyewitness to the lynching of Emmett Till tells his story, with moving recollections of Till as a boy, critical insights into the recent investigation, and powerful lessons for racial reckoning, both then and now.

In 1955, Emmett Till was lynched when he was 14 years old. That remains an undisputed fact of the case that ignited a flame within the civil rights movement that has yet to be extinguished. Yet the rest of the details surrounding the case remain distorted by time and too many tellings. What does justice mean in the resolution of a 66 year-old cold case? In A Few Days Full of Trouble, this question drives a new telling of the story of Emmett Till, relayed by his cousin and best friend—the Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr., a survivor of the night of terror when 14-year-old Emmett was taken from his family’s rural Mississippi Delta home in the dead of night.