A tale of courage

By Brandon Klein | October 8, 2015 at 12:01a.m.

By BRANDON KLEIN

bklein@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

“Thar he.”

Two words that escaped the mouth of Moses Wright, a poor black sharecropper in Mississippi, after he stood up and pointed out in open court the two white men on trial for the murder of his 14-year-old great-nephew, Emmett Till, in 1955. He went down in history as possibly the first black man to accuse a white man of a crime in open court and live.

It’s the kind of courage that should be exemplified with the latest Civil Rights issues, said Simeon Wright, Moses’ son and Till’s cousin.

Moses was “prepared to die,” Wright said. “That’s what we need... the courage you need to tell it and run before you take it back.”

He spoke about his cousin’s murder at Tyler Mahoning Valley History Center, 325 W Federal St., to the scores of people that came out Wednesday night.

Till was kidnapped from his uncle’s house, beaten, shot and killed after whistling to a white woman in August 1955 in Money, Miss. Wright was at the house when they took Till away that night.

“They beat him. They tortured him. They shot him in the head,” he said.

Two men, one the husband of the woman at whom Till whistled, were charged in the 1950s but acquitted of the murder, despite the evidence against them.

Wright called the trial a sham.

Wright’s father moved his family to a suburb Chicago after the events.

Wright and Dale Killinger, an FBI special agent in Mississippi, both spoke at Wednesday’s event, interweaving Killinger’s talking points about the FBI investigation of the case with Wright’s testimony.

Wright, who was 12 years old at the time of the trial, said he was probably the only one at the trial who thought a conviction was possible.

“I got a real good taste of Jim Crow in Mississippi,” he said, referring to the segregation at the time of blacks and whites.

During the Q-and-A session, audience members asked about the current issues blacks and whites face. Wright noted the death of Trayvon Martin and his disagreements with the outcome.

He referred to an interview he had with MSNBC that showed Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showing 54 percent of Americans agreed that people are not judged by the color of their skin. But Wright is skeptical.

Race relations in America have come under recent scrutiny with police-involved deaths of black men such as the Ferguson, Mo., police shooting of Michael Brown and the police-involved death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore.

“Racism is more subtle,” said Penny Wells, director of Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past, which invited Wright to speak as part of Nonviolence Week. “I hope people take back some knowledge about what happened to Emmett Till.”

Roger Lafontaine of Youngstown’s South Side, who attended the event, said he was 7 years old at the time of Till’s death and learned about it when he was 12, spurring interest in the Civil Rights movement.

“I was saddened by the whole thing,” he said of Till’s death. He added that Wright did a great job speaking about the tragic events.

“He made it less painful than it was,” he said.