Wright returned to Mississippi only one time after his November 1955 appearance before the grand jury in the kidnapping phase of the Till case. In September 1957, he attended the funeral of his older brother, Will Wright, in Greenwood. He often talked with his grandson William Parker about the two of them taking a road trip to the Delta, but that never occurred.29
Mose Wright would often debate politics with family members, especially the Vietnam War, which he defended. He was a supporter of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Later, he changed his mind about the war and came to believe that America never should have taken part in it. He sometimes reminisced about the South and how hard he worked in the fields. He remained saddened by the Emmett Till tragedy, but not bitter. He learned several years later that his sister-in-law, Alma Spearman, had harbored bitterness toward him for years for not doing more to prevent her grandson’s kidnapping. She confessed this to Wright once she came to realize that there was nothing Wright could have done to prevent it.30
In 1964, when Simeon left home to join the army, his parents moved to a smaller home in a low-income housing project on Sixty-Third Place.31 In 1970, Elizabeth died, and over the next seven years, Mose’s health declined. He eventually had prostate surgery, which affected the strength in his legs. Living alone, he enjoyed cooking Jiffy Mix and frozen dinners. In time, his eyesight began to wane, and other health problems made it difficult for him to live on his own. One time while alone in his one-bedroom apartment, he lost his balance and fell. He remained on the floor for a day until his grandson, who had a key to the door, went to check on him. The Wright family eventually placed him in the White Oak Nursing Home in Indian Head Park. He died on August 3, 1977. The Chicago Defender ran an obituary acknowledging his role in the Till case.32 The photo of Wright standing and pointing at two accused killers in Sumner will remain a testament to bravery in a Mississippi courtroom.
The three Wright children living at home during those dark days in 1955—Maurice, Robert, and Simeon—each dealt with the tragedy and its aftermath in his own way. For reasons not fully known, Maurice became plagued with problems. He maintained a good job for a while but developed a drinking problem, which began to consume him. Whenever he was able to return to the church, however, he’d abandon the alcohol; unfortunately, he would always fall off the wagon. One Argo resident remembers him as the town drunk.33
In the 1960s, he decided to move to Miracle Valley, Arizona, and affiliate with controversial evangelist and faith healer A. A. Allen. Maurice’s brothers, James and Robert, bought him clothes and a bus ticket to get to Miracle Valley, but it is unknown if he ever made it. He did not return home for years, and when he eventually went back to Argo, it was only for an occasional visit.34 He died in California a homeless alcoholic in 1991. Simeon learned of Maurice’s death when a San Francisco hospital called to ask permission to use the body for research purposes. Simeon declined and brought the remains back to Chicago for burial instead. He theorized that unfounded rumors charging Maurice with complicity with Milam and Bryant, and Maurice’s inability to shake them, were factors in Maurice’s mental breakdown.35
If those stories are fabrications, as Simeon insists they are, the rumors originated close to home. Crosby Smith, brother of Elizabeth Wright and an uncle of Emmett Till who lived in Sumner, said in a 1974 interview that it was Maurice who told Roy Bryant about Till’s indiscretion at the store in Money. Maurice, Smith said, may have been jealous that his Chicago cousin dressed well and came to town with cash in his pocket. “I don’t think Maurice liked Emmett much, but I don’t guess he figured what was going to happen to him, either.”36 Smith gave this interview while both Maurice and Mose Wright were still alive. If this story was unknown to the rest of the family at this time, it seems unlikely that Smith would have perpetuated it in print. Then again, his geographical distance from the rest of the family may have forced him to rely on rumors floating around the Delta.
Mamie Till-Mobley backed up the Maurice angle and in 1995 referred back to a conversation she and Wheeler Parker had once shared.
“What is wrong with Maurice?” she asked her cousin. “It looks like he can’t hold himself together.”
Parker’s response was telling. “Maurice said Bo just won’t let him alone.”37
Still, Simeon Wright dismisses the views of Crosby Smith and Mamie Till-Mobley as inaccurate. In 2007, Wheeler Parker denied ever having conversed with Mamie about Maurice or his problems.38 Even as far back as 1959, William Bradford Huie hinted that the person who informed on Emmett was someone still living in Mississippi. The Wrights had left in September 1955.
Like his brother, Simeon suffered also, mainly from anger and a chip on his shoulder that plagued him for several years after the trial. For him, healing began when he turned himself over to God and married his high school sweetheart, Annie Cole. He also credits schoolteachers in Argo who took him under their wings and helped him adjust to his new life in the North. After graduating from high school in 1962 and then completing his service in the army, Simeon became a pipe fitter for Reynolds Metals, a position he held until his retirement.39 He has been an active speaker since appearing in the theatrically released documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till (later shown on Court TV) and 60 Minutes in 2004. In 2010, he published his memoir, Simeon’s Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till, coauthored with journalist Herb Boyd.
Wheeler Parker, who accompanied Emmett on his fateful visit to Mississippi, also speaks publicly about the murder, was featured in Untold Story and the PBS documentary The Murder of Emmett Till, and appeared on the 60 Minutes segment. The tragic death of his cousin changed his life dramatically. When he heard the commotion outside his bedroom after Milam and Bryant entered the house looking for Till, Parker got scared. “I said ‘They’re going to kill us.’ I thought about it. I started praying to God, I said, ‘Lord, if you let me live, I’ll straighten my life up.’”40 Parker went on to become a barber, graduating from barber school in 1959. He worked at a shop on Fifty-Fifth Street for several years before buying the Esquire Barber Shop in Argo around 1992. He retired after suffering a minor stroke in 2007.41
More significant to his promise to God as he lay frightened in 1955 was his acceptance of Christ in 1961. In 1967, he married Marvel McCain and a decade after that became a minister. He served as an associate minister at the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ, the church that Emmett Till had attended most of his life, and in 1992 became assistant pastor. A year later he was appointed pastor. In 2006, the church celebrated its eightieth anniversary with Parker still at the helm. He and Marvel also organized the nonprofit, interfaith Summit Community Task Force, dedicated to helping troubled youth. Their efforts helped raise funds for the first community center in Argo.42
Crosby Smith, unlike the Wright family, remained in Mississippi after the trial, and died in Sumner in 1993. He witnessed a new Mississippi emerge as a result of the civil rights movement, one where white men would no longer be routinely acquitted for killing black men. “Today, I’d say that’s one hundred percent changed,” he said proudly, two decades after the Till murder. He began voting not long after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed and eventually sat on a jury.43
Smith’s success in preventing the Mississippi burial of Emmett Till and in personally accompanying the body to Chicago made him a hero in the days following the murder. Yet the case remained a painful subject for him. Other than his 1974 interview and another in 1985, he said little about the case, publicly or privately, in the four decades that he lived to think about it. “When you mentioned anything about it he’d get kind of depressed,” said his son, Crosby Smith Jr. “He would stop talking and go into a shell.”44
Wheeler Parker said that this silence extended to the rest of the family also. “There was never any talk done about it after [the trial] among us, to any degree. Never with anyone, not [even] among ourselves. We never sat down and talked about it.” The reasons were simple. “We knew w
hat happened. There was no need to talk about it.” They never discussed it with Mamie Till-Mobley or even Mose Wright, for that matter. “He didn’t talk,” affirmed Simeon. “Not even to me.”45
It was a traumatic ordeal to witness a kidnapping-turned-murder, and the years of silence among the witnesses signified a lasting pain, not a forgetting. “It’s always on your mind,” Parker said solemnly fifty-two years after the experience. “It’s something that just doesn’t go away.”46
Forgetting was also impossible for Willie Reed, who knew Emmett Till only in death but who remained haunted for decades by the beating sounds he heard emanating from a plantation shed on an August morning in Drew, Mississippi. His feelings mirrored those of Wheeler Parker. “That’s something you never put out of your mind. I remember it like it happened yesterday,” he said in 2007.47
After speaking at a few rallies following his late-night move to Chicago on the day the jury issued its verdict, Reed dropped out of sight. He had no contact with any of the other witnesses or Till family members for decades, despite living in Chicago and remaining in close proximity to many of them. Wheeler Parker and Simeon Wright even assumed Reed was dead, possibly even lynched for his testimony, until he reemerged for interviews in 1999.48
In Chicago, Reed obtained a new identity, or more accurately, reclaimed his old one. From the time he was seven months old until he left Mississippi, he lived with his grandfather, Add Reed, and assumed Add’s surname. In Chicago, when Willie obtained a copy of his birth certificate in order to secure a Social Security number, he discovered that his last name was actually Louis, after his father, Joseph Louis. He went by his legal name of Willie Louis from then on, further obscuring his association with the Till case. In fact, most of his friends only learned of his role as a witness after seeing him on television in 2003.49
Adjusting to life in the big city was not easy for the eighteen-year-old, who had never been outside of Mississippi before the murder trial. Barely a week after moving to Chicago, he was hospitalized for a nervous disorder and soon suffered further health problems. Sometime during his first year in the North, he underwent surgery for ulcers, a procedure that removed part of his stomach. His police protection ended a few months after the move, and after a year he was still unemployed (despite receiving several job offers after the trial) and contemplated moving to Detroit in order to find work. He never took advantage of the $1,000 scholarship that the Elks lodge offered him should he have chosen to attend college. “I just didn’t want to do it,” he later said with regret.50
Reed quickly learned that, in the North, blacks were still subject to de facto segregation and discrimination. On one occasion he walked to a Walgreen’s near his home to buy some cigarettes only to find that it was closed. He then went to a nearby bar instead, and when he went in, he noticed everyone was white. “The people looked at me like they had never seen a black man before in their lives.” The bartender asked what he needed, and Reed told him.
“Is Walgreen’s closed?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Reed replied.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” explained the bartender. “I’ll sell you a pack tonight, but make sure next time you go to Walgreen’s.”
After Reed left the bar, he realized what had just happened, and that this exchange only occurred because he was black.51
Things got better, however. Around 1959, he began working as a surgical orderly at Jackson Park Hospital and remained there for forty-seven years before retiring in 2006. While working in the intensive care unit in 1971, he met Juliet Mendenhall, then a nurse’s aide. “Hey there. Why don’t you come over here and give me a kiss?” he asked upon meeting her. Juliet was taken by the thirty-four-year-old bachelor. “I went over there and kissed him on his jaw.” They married in 1976 and made their home in the Englewood area of Chicago. It wasn’t until around 1983 that Willie told Juliet about his role in the Till case. Willie suffered from nightmares for several years into their marriage.52
Reed appeared in the documentaries The Murder of Emmett Till and Untold Story, and in the 2004 60 Minutes piece. His Untold Story interview in 2001 reunited him with Mamie Till-Mobley, whom he had not seen in forty-six years.
On January 6, 2003, Reed was not feeling well and stayed home from work. That day, Mamie died in the emergency room at Jackson Park Hospital. Juliet heard the news around 3:00 P.M. and passed it on to her husband. “If I’d gone to work that day, I’d have seen her,” he said regretfully. Yet he accepted it as fate. “They say all things happen for a reason.”53
After several years of declining health, Willie Reed died of gastronomical bleeding in July 2013 at age seventy-six.54
Add Reed, Willie’s grandfather and another one of the prosecution’s surprise witnesses, remained in Mississippi for several years after the trial. In the late 1960s, he and his wife, Mattie, moved to Chicago. After suffering from an enlarged prostate and other problems, he died of acute renal failure on March 25, 1977, about a week after entering Englewood Hospital. He was ninety-five years old.55
Less is known about Mandy Bradley, the third surprise witness at the trial. Her life took a downturn upon moving to Chicago, and she was reportedly “disillusioned” with the city almost immediately. For a brief period after her arrival, she stayed with Mamie Bradley but told the press that she planned to live with her daughter, Mary Brooks.56 Although Alonzo Bradley began working on a construction project shortly after his move north, upon the first anniversary of the trial, Mandy reported that they had fallen on hard times on Chicago’s West Side, where they lived in a two-room apartment. “They haven’t treated me right,” she said. “Since then [relocating to Chicago] I have really suffered. I’ve been without food, sick, and unable to find work.” Her mother, still in Mississippi, was also ill, and Mandy was frustrated that she could not get back to the South to tend to her. “I’m scared to go back and see about her. I sit here and I cry and I worry and I pray and I ask God don’t take my mother, let me see her again.”57
It is unknown, at present, how Mandy Bradley fared, because she soon fell back into obscurity, and efforts to determine her fate have been unsuccessful. As of this writing, her daughter, Mary, is still living but in poor health. A granddaughter could not recall just when or where Mandy died. She believes it was sometime in the 1960s and that Mandy may have eventually returned to Mississippi.58
Levi “Too Tight” Collins never got his life back on track after the case faded from the news. Following the trial, he worked odd jobs in Jackson and Memphis but disappeared again in 1957. Some said he feared revenge from local whites who worried that he might talk or by blacks angry because he had not. “I’m plumb worried about the boy,” his forty-six-year-old father, Walter Collins, said. “We used to be close. He’d come over to my place almost daily and we’d chat. Now I haven’t seen him but once in three years.” That one occasion was when Levi went by the house and the two ate breakfast together. “I haven’t heard from him since. The case just ruined his whole life.”59
On November 8, 1957, Collins’s wife, Treola, and their four children arrived in Seattle at the invitation of Treola’s sister, Lucinda Burrage, who borrowed $246 from her minister and sent train tickets by way of the Memphis railroad station. “We had to slip off the plantation to catch the train, but we didn’t give our right names,” Treola explained. “We only had the clothing on our backs. I used an old bedspread for diapers on my six-months-old baby. We had one loaf of bread and one can of peaches to eat.”60
For a time, both families, with twelve children between them, shared a three-bedroom house in the projects. Treola suffered a nervous breakdown after the move by simply trying to process everything that had happened in the Delta that drove her away. She shortly rented her own house for $45 a month, but it lacked utilities and even a toilet. The state rejected her application for welfare benefits and encouraged her to return to Mississippi, but she remained in Seattle.61
Levi apparently surfaced long enough for the
couple to divorce, because Treola eventually married Clent Gaston on August 9, 1960. Sadly, Levi never resumed a relationship with his children, all of whom Gaston later adopted. Treola managed to create a new life for herself in Seattle, where she bore five more children. Levi was not so lucky. Family members heard enough to know that the case completely destroyed him. He became an alcoholic and schizophrenic, hearing voices and hallucinating. He died in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1992.62
Like Treola, Levi’s father, Walter, also moved to Seattle. After his divorce from Levi’s mother, he married Elizabeth Tyler, Treola’s sister, and maintained a relationship with his grandchildren. Even Treola’s children from her second marriage called him “Uncle Walt.” He died in Seattle in February 1996.63
Clent Gaston eventually became a preacher, and Treola became prominent in the House of Refuse Pentecostal Church in Seattle, the church she had attended ever since her move there. She became a missionary and served as the Hospitality Board president. Although she successfully put the painful past of the Till case behind her, when each of her children turned eighteen, she sat them down and told them about what had happened. “My mother was wise for doing that,” said her daughter, Marsha Gaston. Treola died of cancer in Seattle in 1996, her last words being, “Yes, Lord.”64
Not long after Henry Lee Loggins finished his six-month stint in jail for theft, he left Mississippi, as his friends hoped he would. At first, he moved to St. Louis, where he had lived a few years earlier, then moved to Dayton, Ohio, in 1957. He did not surface publicly until July 2001 when historians David and Linda Beito found him and interviewed him over the telephone. For years he made a living in Dayton as a junkman.65 He later appeared in Untold Story and 60 Minutes, where he denied any knowledge of, or involvement in, the Till murder. He insisted that all he knew was what others had told him.
Loggins’s wife, Earlean Adams Loggins, died in July 2001 just before Henry Lee was contacted by the Beitos. Four years later, Henry Lee became incapacitated after suffering a stroke but spent time in a nursing home and later at his daughter’s home recovering.66 He died in Dayton in October 2009. Since 1982, his son Johnny B. Thomas has been mayor of the village of Glendora, Mississippi, former home to both Loggins and J. W. Milam.
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