The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

They all agreed on the following set of facts, as laid out by the defense: Emmett Till had been hidden by the NAACP in the North, in either Chicago or Detroit, and Willie Reed and Moses Wright had been coached by professional, probably communist agitators, and Mamie Till had played along with the plot in exchange for a life insurance payout for her not-dead son, and she’d flown down and lied about recognizing her son, lied about her tears and emotion, and all of this had been arranged by shadowy powers who wanted to overthrow the southern way of life as a precursor to an attack on the United States itself. The body pulled from the Tallahatchie River had been donated to the cause by a helpful mortician. These people had access to bodies, the defense attorneys had said. They would stop at nothing to attack Mississippi.

Parks stayed seated. The driver got up and came back to stand over her. Arrest and a potential beating awaited if she refused his order. She thought about her grandfather, the son of a white plantation owner, and how he always kept a shotgun within reach to shoot back if some night riders came to do violence to his family. She said later she thought in that moment about Emmett Till.

The barn always felt like a place that repelled people. Marvel Parker described it as “macabre” the first time we ever spoke about it. It was the site of violence, of shame, of depthless cruelty, a complicated site for historians to interpret or figure out an appropriate way to visit. All the other sites carry some note of redemption or tell the story of the societal decay that led to the killing, but this is a reminder of the opposite. There is no heroism to remember here. No defiance. Nobody burst through the door in the nick of time, or risked their life for another, nobody stood up to evil, no one stopped the torture. The only other space in twentieth-century American history with a similar absence of redemption is the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. But that’s a site of pilgrimage. The barn remains a working barn.