Emmet Till, known to friends and family as Bobo, arrived in Mississippi by train on Saturday, Aug. 20, or Sunday, Aug. 21, 1955 — accounts differ as to the precise date. By the 21st, he had settled in at the home of a great-uncle, Moses Wright, near Money.
On the evening of Wednesday, Aug. 24, Emmett drove with a group of local Black teenagers to the Bryants’ store. Among them were 18-year-old Ruthie Mae Crawford, who years later spoke of having been able to see Emmett through the store’s plate-glass window the whole time, and Simeon Wright, Till’s 12-year-old cousin.
Emmett went into the store to buy a small item, most likely two cents’ worth of bubble gum.
Mr. Bryant, who moonlighted as a trucker, was out of town, hauling a load of shrimp from New Orleans to Texas. Mrs. Bryant was tending the counter; she testified in court that her sister-in-law Juanita Milam, J.W.’s wife, was in the living quarters, looking after the Bryant boys and her own two children.
By most accounts, Emmett was alone with Mrs. Bryant for not much more than a minute before one of his companions — in Simeon Wright’s recollection, it was he — concerned that Emmet would not know how to comport himself around a Southern white woman, went in to fetch him.
“While I was in the store, Bobo did nothing inappropriate,” Mr. Wright recounted in “Simeon’s Story,” his 2010 memoir of the case. “Bobo didn’t ask her for a date or call her ‘baby.’ There was no lecherous conversation between them.”
