Sixty years later, Emmett Till's cousin recalls the night he last saw him

August 25, 2015

On the anniversary of Emmett Till's murder, misconceptions still cloud what happened in his last days, his cousin says

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Sixty years later, Emmett Till's cousin recalls the night he last saw him

When a 14-year-old African American boy named Emmett Till whistled at a white woman outside her shop in 1955, his cousin Simeon Wright remembers being terrified. “That scared us half to death,” he said. “Whistling at a white woman in Mississippi? It’s better to play with a rattlesnake.” Later that week, Till was kidnapped and brutally murdered. In this excerpt from a special episode of America Tonight, Joie Chen travels to the Mississippi Delta to meet Wright, who takes us back to the grocery store where a whistle led to an execution.


 

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