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Cody Gadd

Professor Charles K. Ross

HIS 308

April 25, 2017

Anne Moody and Simeon Wright: Growing Up in Jim Crow Mississippi

Anne Moody’s autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi was published in 1968. It is

a very personal story about what she experienced as an African American growing up in

Mississippi in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Simeon Wright published Simeon’s Story: An Eyewitness

Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till with co-author Herb Boyd in 2010. It is the true story

of what Wright personally witnessed in 1955 when Emmett Till, his cousin, was kidnapped and

murdered in Mississippi. Both Moody and Wright wrote about how their childhoods and the Jim

Crow south affected them, showing how it shaped their lives and changed the people they grew

up to be.

Moody grew up in extreme poverty as the oldest child in her family. Her earliest

memories are of living in a rotten two-room shack while her parents worked in the fields of the

landowner six days a week from sunup to sundown. Her father left the family when Moody was

a little girl and this made it even harder for the family to make it. They were hungry a lot of the

time. Her mother worked as a waitress in a restaurant for blacks, then later as a maid in the

homes of white families. Moody wrote “Sometimes Mama would bring us the white family’s

leftovers. It was the best food I had ever eaten. That was when I discovered that white folks ate

different from us. They had all kinds of different food with meat and all. We always had just

beans and bread” (Moody 29). Moody’s family could not afford bread from the store and the

children took peanut butter on homemade biscuits to school for lunch. She was so embarrassed
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when other students made fun of her for the biscuits that she started eating her lunch on the way

to school. As a child Moody worked for white families as a maid or taking care of their children

to earn money to help her mother buy food, including bread they could take for their school

lunch. She worked for Mrs. Claiborne, the Home Economics teacher from the white school, and

she taught her things like how to speak correctly and how to set the table. Things were a little

better when they moved in with Raymond, a soldier her mother had several other children by, but

it was still hard.

Simeon Wright grew up in a very different kind of family. Moses, his preacher father,

was always there and was a strong presence in their home. Wright was the youngest child and

when he was twelve years old, his father was sixty-three. However, his father was very energetic,

never lazy, and was always working. The family lived in a four bedroom sharecropper house

that had three porches and also owned a car. Wright wrote, “Dad was a great provider and we

never missed a meal” (Wright 31). The family had chickens, hogs, plenty of eggs, and a

vegetable garden. On Sundays they would have chicken for both breakfast and supper. They had

dessert most days, usually pie made from blueberries or blackberries they picked. Wright

described how the family ordered things from the Sears catalog because the prices were better

than what the white stores gave black customers. It included everything from their new clothes

for school to the baby chickens his father ordered each year.

Even though one family was very poor and the other family was better off, there were

similarities in the childhoods of Moody and Wright. Both worked in the cotton fields and picked

cotton, Wright on his dad’s sharecropper fields and Moody for Raymond. Wright said his dad

would “watch us like a hawk in the cotton fields, making sure we did our share and didn’t waste

a lot of time” (Wright 27). Moody was very angry about having to quit her job with Mrs.
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Claiborne to chop cotton but she learned to do a good job of it. She wrote “Soon I even began to

like the work. I’d pull off my shoes and let the hot earth fall over my feet as I was hoeing. It sent

a warm feeling over my whole body. Even the burning of the hot sun no longer frightened me,

but seemed to give me energy” (Moody 88).

Both Wright and Moody had to deal every day with the effects of the Jim Crow south.

Segregation and oppression was a way of life. Moody described playing with the Johnson

children, who were white, every day because their houses were not far apart but when she saw

them at a Saturday movie and followed her friends into the white lobby, she was pushed out and

yelled at by her mother. She wrote “I had never really thought of them as white before. Now all

of a sudden they were white, and their whiteness made them better than me” (Moody 34). She

began to think about how their schools, homes, and even their part of the movie theater was nicer

and she struggled to figure out why and what it meant. Wright wrote about the “muted” voices of

the blacks caused by growing up in a Mississippi that was racist and what happened to the ones

who spoke out. He said, “Our place in the world was second class, and silence in the face of

danger was expected” (Wright 47).

In the summer of 1955, Wright’s second cousin Bobo (Emmett) Till visited from Chicago

to stay with his great uncle Moses and the family. Bobo was different not only in the way he

dressed but in his attitude and behavior. Wright and the other children wore overalls or blue

jeans but Bobo had khakis and a silver ring with his dad’s initials on it. He was used to having

money and attention because he was an only child. He liked to joke around and make people

laugh. He picked cotton with the cousins for one day but then quit because he did not like the

hard work so he would stay at the house with Wright’s mother while the others worked. When

the boys were pushed around by an older boy one day no one said anything and Bobo ran them
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down for not standing their ground. Wright said Bobo had “an attitude of defiance and boldness

that was not easy for me or any of us to express” (Wright 47). Bobo also did not understand what

Wright called the “Mississippi rules” (Wright 50) so they tried to stay close to him in public to

watch him and make sure he didn’t say anything out of line.

On Wednesday, August 24 they were at Bryant’s grocery store in Money when Bobo got

left inside alone for less than a minute with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman working behind the

counter. Wright’s brother sent him inside quickly and while they were in there, he did not see

Bobo do or say anything that was out of line but when they came outside and Mrs. Bryant

walked out to her car, he did a loud wolf whistle at her as a joke because he thought it would get

them to laugh. Wright said they were very afraid because Bobo had done something that was

against a “long standing unwritten law, a social taboo about conduct between blacks and whites

in the south” (Wright 51). They ran to the car to leave and go home. Bobo begged the other boys

not to tell their dad what he had done because he was afraid he would be sent back to Chicago.

On Thursday, they were told by a neighbor girl that there was going to be trouble about what

happened and that the Bryants were not going to let it go. After the family returned from a trip to

Greenwood that Saturday, there was a knock on the door in the middle of the night and when

Moses Wright went to the door, there were two white men, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant. Another

man was behind them and hiding his face. Milam had a gun and a flashlight in his hands. The

men came into the house, looked until they found Bobo, made him get dressed, and took him

away.

The family was very afraid, especially Wright’s mother. She tried to get help from their

white neighbors but they refused. She ended up going to stay with family in another town, then

on to Chicago later and never came back to their house or Mississippi again. Wright and his
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brothers were sent to stay for three nights with the Lewis family, who lived in the woods but

later came home to help in the cotton fields. During this time the children were all scared and

could not eat. Wright’s father reported the kidnapping to Sheriff Smith who arrested Bryant and

Milam on Monday but they still did not know where Bobo was or what had happened to him. On

Wednesday, a week after the incident at the store Bobo’s badly beaten body was found floating

in the Tallahatchie River.

In 1955 Anne Moody was fourteen years old, the same age as Emmett Till. She heard

about what had happened to him from other students while walking home from school. Her

mother would not discuss it with her and told her to act like she didn’t know anything about it

when she went to work that afternoon at the Burke’s house. She was so nervous and upset that

she dropped food in the floor and broke dishes by accident. When Mrs. Burke asked her if she

knew about what happened, she told Moody “He was killed because he got out of his place with

a white woman. A boy from Mississippi would have known better than that. Negroes up north

have no respect for people. They think they can get away with anything” (Moody 132). Moody

was so upset she could not eat and was shaking all over when she went home. Mrs. Burke’s

words had made her feel like “rotten garbage” (Moody 132). She had been afraid of a lot of

things in her life like hunger or the devil but now because of what happened to Emmett Till, she

was afraid of being killed only because she was black.

Courage is something that Anne Moody, Simeon Wright, and Moses Wright all had.

Simeon Wright and his father were both called to testify at the first trial of Bryant and Milam.

Milam had threatened Moses on the night Bobo was kidnapped, telling him that if he said

anything he would kill him before his next birthday. Before the trial, many people told him to

leave the state but he was determined to do what was right and said he felt he had to do it. Moses
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took the stand and when he was asked to identify Milam as one of the white men who kidnapped

Bobo, he stood and pointed him out. This was a great act of courage and a moment that Simeon

Wright felt like he remembered, but he was not actually there in the courtroom at the time. He

saw a photo that was taken of it later.

The courage his father showed gave Simeon Wright the courage to agree to testify at the

trial himself, but he never had to actually get on the witness stand. There was a time when he did

not want to talk at all about what happened to Bobo, but later he had many chances to say what

actually happened to correct the lies that were told and went on to write his book about it. Moody

joined the NAACP even though her family begged her not to because they were threatened that it

would be trouble for them. She participated in the sit-in at the whites only lunch counter at

Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963. The mob poured ketchup and mustard on them,

sprayed them with spray paint, and threw things at them. Moody was slapped and dragged off the

stool by her hair. When they went outside Moody wrote about how a line of policemen separated

them from the mob, but they threw things at them as they walked by.

In 2008 Simeon Wright went to meetings and press conferences to speak in favor of the

passing of a bill called the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Bill, or the “Till Bill.” It

created a unit at the Justice Department that would work to investigate unsolved murders related

to civil rights that happened before 1970. The bill passed and the vote in the Senate was

unanimous. Wright said “Of all the memorials, monuments, and other commemorations of

Bobo’s life, nothing pleases me more than to have this bill in tribute to his very brief stay among

us. . . as his cousin I am immensely grateful that in so many ways he will never be forgotten”

(Wright 128).

Both Anne Moody and Simeon Wright were deeply affected by the Jim Crow Mississippi
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they grew up in. They both had experiences that changed them as people and gave them courage

to work for racial equality. They saw it first hand and talked about what they experienced. On the

last page of his book Simeon Wright said “If you want an accurate account of any story, go to the

primary sources. They know what really happened” (137).