A new perspective is being added to the case of Emmett Till with a book that offers a firsthand account of Till’s kidnapping.
Simeon Wright, Till’s cousin, claims that he witnessed Till whistling at Carolyn Bryant, saw Till’s kidnapping and more. He writes about these events in “Simeon’s Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till,” which was released earlier this month.
Till, a 14-year-old youth from Chicago, was abducted and killed in 1955 after whistling at Bryant, who was white, while at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money.
Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted in the death by an all-white jury but later admitted in a magazine interview that they had killed Till.
“‘Please don’t tell your father I whistled at that lady,’ Bobo (Emmett’s nickname) pleaded. It never occurred to me that Bobo would be killed for whistling at a white woman,” Wright wrote. “I thought he might be whipped if he were caught — but never murdered.”
Wright told the Southtown Star, a suburban Chicago newspaper, that he regrets not telling his father, Moses Wright, what had happened.
“We should have (told),” Wright said. “We thought we were doing him a favor. He was afraid he was going to get sent home. We was having so much fun we didn’t want that to happen.”
Till, from Chicago was staying with Wright’s family.
Wright, 67, said he will no longer remain silent about the details surrounding Till’s lynching. He said that as an eyewitness, he believes much of the account has been portrayed incorrectly.
Wright, a longtime resident of Summit, Ill., claims he was with Till at Bryant’s Grocery and even shared a bed with him the night of the kidnapping.
Wright said Till did in fact whistle at Bryant. Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, thought he might have done that to correct his stutter.
“To him it was funny — whistling at Carolyn Bryant was funny,” Wright told the Star. “He didn’t get scared until he saw our reaction. It was just funny play.”
Wright spent a year and a half working on the book with writer Herb Boyd. He said he wrote some of the stories and dictated others.
He told the Star that he could not quite finish reading his own finished book.
“I had to put it down,” he said.
Wright’s book has been praise d by some civil rights activists.
“‘Simeon’s Story’ is one that must be heard and never forgotten,” U.S. Rep. John Lewis said. “In simple, plain language, Wright describes an event that shocked the conscience of the nation and gave birth to the modern-day civil rights movement in America.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton said he hopes the book will invigorate the search for justice from that era.
“It is my hope that (‘Simeon’s Story’) renews our efforts to deal with the nation’s lingering inequities, particularly the hundreds of unsolved murder cases from the civil rights era,” Sharpton said.
