Hebrew letters on her front door spell out her last name: Liebman. Sepia-toned portraits of her Jewish ancestors mix well with Haitian paintings and Obama posters. This was the “salon” scene on Sunday, Aug. 5, for Gale Liebman, retired District 97 teacher who co-hosted with her black boyfriend, Joe, a book-signing with Simeon Wright, the cousin of Emmett Till, whom many baby boomers know as the black teen kidnapped, castrated and killed in Money, Miss., in 1955 for whistling at a white woman.
Wright, who lives in the western suburbs, was asked by Gail and Joe to chat with current D97 teachers — including four who are working on a Haitian service-learning project — to discuss this historic murder that shocked the nation.
Liebman invited Till’s educator-mom, Mamie Till Mobley, to speak to D97 teachers twice before Mobley died. I featured Mobley on a radio program that won the 2000 Chicago Association of Black Journalists Award for Top Features Documentary, thanks to the power of her first-person account.
At Liebman’s house, Wright set the record straight, while signing copies of his book. A summer afternoon Oak Park parlor chat at a retired educator’s house seemed an unlikely spot for a survivor of one of the 20th century’s most heinous hate crimes. Yet here he was. Amid the cordial backdrop of pastries and punch, three dozen citizens, ranging from children to seniors, crowded into Liebman’s North Taylor Street living room to hear the man who was present when his visiting 14-year-old cousin was snatched out their bedroom on that fateful day.
Wright, 69, a first cousin to Emmett Till’s mom and second cousin to Emmett, was in the same room when the cowardly kidnappers came.
“Emmett and I shared a bedroom in my parents’ house in Money, Miss.,” he recalled. “Earlier that day, Emmett and I went to a grocery store in town. Outside the store, he whistled at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant. I was frightened to death. We couldn’t get out of town fast enough. Later that night, I saw white men in my bedroom. Most were strangers. One I knew. They all had guns. Mom was hysterical. My relatives all begged them to leave us and Emmett alone, my father in particular.
“One of the white men asked my father how old he was. Dad said he was 64. Then one white man said, ‘If you want to live to be 65, don’t say a word about tonight!’ They marched Emmett out of the room. Later they beat him, tortured him and shot him in the head. It was horrible! And while the murder upset us so much that we couldn’t sleep, what seemed to be worse was the verdict after a brief trial, where white men were tried by an all-white jury that found them innocent. This was possible because of Jim Crow desegregation conditions that made blacks powerless in economic and political ways. The blacks in my community were intimidated against voting, which is why they were not picked to be in the jury pool. To this day, when I speak to young people and educators like you, I say, ‘If you don’t vote, you don’t count!'”
The crowd was speechless as Wright, a tall, sinewy senior concluded his talk. He explained the reason he wrote the book, Simeon’s Story, was so he could get the story right. Apparently, well-meaning journalists, filmmakers and historians mis-reported aspects of the incident, and he felt the only way to accurately portray the events as they really happened was to pen his own book. For example, he said it was a “myth” that one of his relatives told the white kidnappers his address in exchange for a “50-cent store credit,” which he called a “flat-out lie.”
He also discounted an award-winning documentary that claims his father immediately left the state.
“He went to a neighboring town for a while but did not leave the state until much later than Eyes on the Prize claims. My mom took us to Chicago shortly after the murder. I’ve been here ever since. It took me a while to let it go. When I was 24, I had a vision that made me give up smoking, cursing and being angry; and instead now I fill my heart with joy and Christ.”