Simeon Wright is a retired pipe fitter living in west suburban Summit Argo. He’s a church deacon and a happily married man. He also has a place in history, though he’s not proud of the reason.
Simeon was 12 then. Now he’s 67. For years he tried to stifle the memory and flat-out refused to talk about it, even to his wife, Annie. But it wouldn’t go away, and it has finally come out in the form of a book: Simeon’s Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till, cowritten with New York journalist Herb Boyd and published by Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of Chicago Review Press. The book is about more than that terrible day. It’s also about a man who could’ve stayed angry his entire life but found a way not to.
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He met Annie in 1964, and they started dating. To her he seemed well-adjusted, regular. But mentally he was struggling.
“I got tired of him” complaining about distorted accounts, she says. “I said, ‘Well, if you want the truth, then write it.’ He kept hee-hawing. I told him he wasn’t no spring chicken.”
The stunned southerners panicked, and Bobo begged them not to tell anyone what he’d done. Simeon didn’t.
