Twelve-year-old Simeon Wright lay in his bed in his family's small house near Money, Miss., in the Mississippi Delta. It was Saturday night, Aug. 27, 1955, and Simeon was tired from a busy week. Wright was looking up at the raindrop ceiling, gray with the casts of traces of moonlight. For the last eight days, he had been hanging out with his older cousin Emmett Louis Till, and other cousins and friends, all teens—or, like Simeon, almost-teens.
When Emmett, or "Bobo" as his relatives called him, came to town from Chicago, he was a bit in charge. He was a city boy, after all, and his teachers considered him a natural leader.
Emmett, who was born on the South Side of Chicago on July 25, 1941, had lost his father at age 2, when his soldier-dad was hanged in Italy during World War II. Emmett then contracted polio when he was 5. The effects of the disease made him stutter—but he was still an active teenager who liked to play practical jokes on friends and cousins.
Along with his cousin Wheeler Parker, 16, the 160-pound teen had taken the Illinois Central train down to Mississippi for a summer visit to relatives who had stayed around when his family moved to Chicago. He arrived on Sunday, Aug. 21. While he was in Mississippi, Emmett shared a bed with 12-year-old Simeon. During the day, he helped picked cotton for his great-uncle and Simeon's daddy, Mose Wright, a sharecropper.
Fear of White Wrath
One of the previous week's most eventful days had been Wednesday, Aug. 24. After leaving the cotton fields around 7:30 p.m., Emmett, Simeon and Wheeler joined 16-year-old Maurice Wright, 15-year-old Roosevelt Crawford and 18-year-old Ruthie Mae Crawford for a trip into town. They had a little money, earned while picking cotton, in their pockets to buy some candy and soda.
"Town" wasn't much of one. There were only four main buildings. They headed toward the one they catered to black field hands—Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market—owned by Roy Bryant, a 24-year-old veteran of the 82nd Airborne. His wife, Carolyn—a 21-year-old high school dropout from Indianola with two sons—often worked behind the counter. The Bryants were members of the Baptist church and lived in the back of the store.
Carolyn Bryant was working that day, along with Juanita Milam, the wife of Bryant's half-brother J.W. Milam, 36. The kids hung out for a bit in front of the store, as was common there. They didn't all crowd into the store at once. First, Wheeler went in and bought something, then Emmett went inside.
But Emmett, probably due to his big-city background, didn't play by the rules that were so ingrained in blacks and whites in the Jim Crow South. When he paid for his gum, he placed the money directly into the hands of Mrs. Bryant rather than on the counter, a Mississippi taboo that Till knew nothing about, or didn't think mattered very much.
Simeon went into the store to get Emmett to come back outside. Soon, Carolyn Bryant would walk out of the store past the group. Then Till whistled at her, infuriating her.
That whistle shot shivers up the spines of Till's Mississippi cousins. They knew of the harsh consequences that could come when a black person stepped over such a forbidden line, especially a young black man toward a married white woman. It was unheard of to whistle at a white woman. Till's whistle was heard loudly on that day by everyone within earshot.
The cousins rushed Emmett into a car and drove like lightening away from the store. They were scared and paranoid. At one point, they believed Carolyn Bryant was following them. They thought she had a gun. They stopped the car, jumped out and ran into the fields to get away from her. They soon figured out that she or whoever was in the car was not after them.
Fear of white wrath had set in; Emmett simply had not grasped the entire concept of what was happening around him. Simeon feared for him, but the young people decided not to tell Mose, fearing that he would send Emmett home to Chicago, before their summer vacation had ended. Rumors went around that the young man had "wolf-whistled" at Bryant, but still they did not tell. They did continue to fear, however.
Four more days would go by before the fear would prove warranted.
Choking Life With Fear
Simeon didn't lie awake long on Saturday night. Soon the strong hold of sleepiness took over for Simeon and Emmett, and they were out for the night, their youthful energy stored for a new day.
As Wright lay sleeping, the pounding of boots and strong voices traveled through the home, like smoke from a blazing fire, choking life with fear. It was 2 a.m., early the morning of Aug. 28.
Flashlights and voices cut through the darkness of the room, alarming the boys, that night four in one room, two to a bed. They awoke to see what looked to be giant white men with pistols dangling at their sides rushing into their room. The men were bullying Mose Wright and demanding "the boy from Chicago that done the talking."
When asked if he was the one, Till said "Yeah." The response—not the "yes, sir" the men believed they were entitled to by race—agitated the intruders even more. "Don't say, 'Yeah' to me: I'll blow your head off. Get your clothes on," Milam boomed.
The men, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, then told Emmett, who was sleeping only in his shorts, to put on his clothes. They turned to Wright and instructed him to close his eyes and go back to sleep. He silently refused, standing helplessly as his great-nephew prepared to leave his house with the two white men.
Minutes passed while Simeon watched as his cousin, seemingly unafraid of what might happen, put on his clothes. Little did Simeon know that his cousin, his friend was dressing for death. All that the 12-year-old saw was the most courageous boy on Earth. Emmett demanded that he be able to put on his socks, after being told to leave them, in front of men who clearly meant him harm.
Simeon then watched as Emmett walked out of the room, poised and a prisoner of two men much older, much larger, filled with hate.
The men then marched Emmett out the front door as Moses and his wife, Elizabeth, begged and pleaded for Emmett with promises of payment and sending him home to Chicago, which was the way that young black men were often saved from white men in the South. Their pleas grew more unsuccessful with each footstep. The men were intent on taking Emmett, on making him pay for what he had done, for violating the sacred code of the South.
The night was silent, chilly for a hot August night thick with suffocating humidity. Simeon swallowed the disturbing air of night, closed his mouth and wondered with fear what would happen to his cousin from Chicago.
'I Know How to Work 'Em'
Simeon, of course, would not see what happened to his cousin next—but he would learn the gory, horrifying details later, mostly from the memories of Willie Reed, an 18-year-old black field hand who said he saw Bryant and Milam barreling down a dirt road toward Sheridan's Plantation in Drew, which was managed by Milam's brother, Leslie Milam. Four white men were in the truck; three black men were in the back, one of them Emmett. The other two are suspected of assisting the white men in the murder.
After returning to the plantation later that morning, Reed heard screams of pain coming from the barn. He tried to get closer to look, but was blocked by Milam and his Colt .45. The two men would later tell Look magazine that they pistol-whipped Emmett with their .45s—much as Milam had done to get information out of German prisoners while fighting overseas. "I like niggers—in their place—I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin'. I'm likely to kill him," Milam—known as "Big Milam" due to his hefty frame—would later say.
Then Milam got a discarded fan, three feet high and circular, used to gin cotton. They took Emmett to the banks of the Tallahatchie River—where they would later say they shot him in the head to finish him off—tied the 75-pound fan to his by-then naked body with barbed-wire, and pushed him into the river. They returned to Milam's house to burn the boy's clothes. They later said his thick-soled crepe shoes took three hours to burn.
It took only about 72 hours for Emmett's badly deformed body to turn up on Aug. 31, found by a group of boys fishing eight miles downstream in the river. His left eye was gone, forehead crushed, his head had a gaping bullet hole. Three days later, the body was returned to Chicago where his mother, then known as Mamie E. Bradley, insisted on an open casket so that the world could see what white Mississippi had done to her boy, whom she could no longer recognize. On Sept. 15, Jet Magazine published a photo of the corpse, shocking the sensibility of a nation that had turned its back on race violence for so long.
It was widely known that Bryant and Milam committed the crimes; they were arrested and then tried and quickly acquitted of the murder on Sept. 25, 1955, by an all-white male jury that deliberated for 63 minutes. Then in October, Bryant and Milam—who could not be re-tried—sold their confession to Look magazine for $4,000, admitting to killing the boy. They, however, claimed to have acted alone, implicating no others in the crime.
However, filmmaker Keith Beauchamp argues in "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till" that other witnesses were there and that others, who are still living, participated in the murders. His film led, 50 years later, to an FBI investigation into the case, which included exhumation of Till's body, and positive ID. The new probe concluded last week, and the nation awaits to see if new indictments are forthcoming in the case.
This narrative is based on commentary by Simeon Wright at Jackson State University, research by Keith Beauchamp and PBS, the Look Magazine interview with Bryant and Milam, and articles that appeared in the Black Collegian and The Washington Post.
Additional reporting by Donna Ladd.
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