Wright Thompson and The Barn, the Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi (2024)
In August 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was abducted and murdered in rural Mississippi for whistling at a White woman. After his brutal killing, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley stepped up to make sure that the rest of the country was aware of what had happened to her son. She insisted on an open coffin at his funeral and allowed Jet magazine to publish a photograph of him in that coffin. In the years to follow, Emmett Till became both a hero for the Civil Rights movement and a symbol of the cruelty of White racism.
More recently, after continued senseless killings, Till’s story has been resurrected with over 20 books written about him since 2015. A 2000 documentary, Free at Last: Civil Rights Heroes, recounts his story. The Emmett Till Interpretative Center opened in Sumner, MS in 2015, and a movie, Till (2022), featured Jalyn Hall as Emmett Till and Danielle Deadwyler as his mother.
Just last year, Mississippi author, Wright Thompson, who was born in 1976, only twenty- three miles from where the killing occurred, published The Barn, The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, a most extraordinary book. Wright, who is White, grew up in rural Mississippi in an upper-middle class family. He attended one of the private academies in Mississippi that sprang up in 1969 when the federal government finally mandated the end to school segregation. Thompson admits that he had never even heard about the murder of Emmett Till until he left Mississippi to attend college.
During the pandemic, Thompson became fascinated with the Emmett Till case after he learned about the continued existence of the barn where Till was tortured and killed. A long-time writer for ESPN and other magazines, Thompson first published “His Name was Emmett Till” in the September 2021 issue of The Atlantic. For the article and book, he interviewed hundreds of people, Black and White, who were, in some way, connected with Till’s death.
Thompson’s strongest ally (and source) was Wheeler Parker, Jr., who was Emmett’s cousin, friend, and next-door neighbor in Chicago. In August of 1955, the two boys had traveled by train to Mississippi to visit relatives. Parker and other teenagers were with Till at the store when he whistled at Carolyn Bryant, the wife of Roy Bryant, the store’s owner.
With Parker’s help and that of many others, Thompson retells Emmett Till’s story. Another Black teenager, Willie Reed, witnessed the killing at the barn and, under pressure, identified two of the murderers, J. R. Milam and Roy Bryant. (Thompson believes that six other men were also involved in the killing.) Reed testified in court to a jury of white men. They found the killers innocent in spite of Reed’s testimony and Mamie Till-Mobley’s impassioned defense of her son. After their acquittal, Milam and Bryant, manipulated by one of their lawyers and an unscrupulous writer, sold a half-true account to Look magazine, admitting that they had murdered Emmett Till and tossed his body into the river. Afterward Milam and Bryant became pariahs in their community.
Besides conducting countless interviews, Thompson did extensive archival research, uncovering material that had deliberately been kept hidden through nearly seventy years. The Barn is particularly riveting because of Thompson’s reactions both to this material and to the people he learned to know while writing the book. The Barn evolves both an historical account and a personal memoir of a white Southerner. Thompson’s culpability serves as a metaphor for that of all White Americans. Thompson writes, “This book is my attempt to go beyond what is known and explore the unknown registers of a killing, that when seen clearly, illuminates the true history of our country.”
Along with his emphasis on the killing, Thompson also traces the history of how the Mississippi Delta evolved as an agricultural center for both the production of cotton and perpetuation of the slave and the share-cropper population needed to enrich both local and out-of-state owners. Another focus in The Barn is the parallel rise of native music in the Delta, especially the Blues. Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters, all grew up in the area where Emmett Till died.
Thompson constructed his book in four sections. The first, “The Barn” covers much of the material included in his Atlantic article. He recounts his first visits to the barn and meeting its current owner, a dentist, who nonchalantly declared the barn’s ugly history part of the past. Section two, “Destinies,” recounts the evolution of the Delta, ultimately controlled by “big business” outside the South. Thompson also analyzes the class structure in the Delta: Blacks at the bottom and racist poor Whites, just above them.
“1955,” the third part of the book, moves back and forth from the year of the murder to the near present with Wheeler Parker as the central figure. In “Tomorrow,” the final section, Thompson covers the aftermath of the trial when, Thompson writes, “The barn disappeared from history.” Thompson ends his study describing the 2015 founding of the Emmett Till Interpretative Center and the National Park Service’s purchase of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, where Emmett Till’s murderers were acquitted. It has become part of the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument. On what would have been Emmett Till’s 81st birthday, July 25, 2023, President Joseph Biden announced the purchase; Wheeler Parker spoke at the White House ceremony. Not in the book but important: In December 2023, film-maker Shonda Rhimes donated the money to purchase the barn where Emmett Till died.
