The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

Black citizens called the Tallahatchie the Singing River because of all the lynching victims who’d been thrown into its dark water. Their souls sang out from the water, a wellspring of Black death and white wealth.

Nothing about the physical appearance or ecosystem of the Delta carries any of the Creator’s fingerprints. This land is man-made. Not until learning about the barn had I considered the idea that removing God’s dominion from his creation might also remove his protection, leaving this corner of the world undefended from the impulses and desires of man, and the demands of commerce.

Till’s murder, a brutal window into the truth of a place and its people, had been pushed almost completely from the local collective memory, not unlike the floodwaters kept at bay by carefully engineered reservoirs and levee walls.

The erasure was a collective effort, one that continues to this day. This isn’t comfortable history to face. The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground.

Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it. Once you connect all the dots, there’s almost nowhere they don’t lead. Which is why so many have fought literally and figuratively for so long to keep the reality from view.

Bill Gates is the third-largest landowner in the state of Mississippi.

The town where Emmett Till died is named after a girl who was raised on a farm owned by a founding family of the Ku Klux Klan. The barn where Till died is within eyeshot of that very land.

Several generations grew up seeing the barn every day and were never told about it, perhaps owing to some well-intentioned parental desire to protect their children from what their ancestors experienced, a palpable silence laid over the land like a blanket being snapped and spread. White mothers and fathers in this part of Sunflower County didn’t talk about it. Black mothers and fathers didn’t either.

The real heroes of Township 22 North, any thorough history reveals, were determined mothers who refused to let the state limit their children.

Why did a bright, hopeful child get murdered for whistling in 1955? What about the intersection of Emmett and the Mississippi Delta at that specific time led to his death? The attitudes and intentions are why we should bring it up, to interrogate the present to see what of the past remains. Because our present day potential for violence is alive and undiminished.

You have to go all the way back to figure out how we got here. And I realized that you have to go back to slavery time really, when people weren’t treated as human beings. That’s where it started. And so, in my mind, people were oppressed so long. And when slavery ended, they were so far behind in terms of knowledge, in terms of power, in terms of wealth. They were still poor, living in poverty. They didn’t have jobs. They didn’t know how to read. All those things happened.” “And then every law passed made it harder to catch up?” I asked. “Right. To make it harder to catch up. Not easier. We as a society put things in place that made that not get any easier. Black Wall Street? Burned down. All that Reconstruction, you know? We weren’t allowed to go to school to learn how to read or how to speak. Or how to talk, or learn anything about politics and the way the system works.”

Washington had believed the native tribes should remain independent nations within the United States but he could tell this was a losing battle. His correspondence is full of his fear that the nation he’d helped found would erase these tribes.

Niambi M. Carter, an author and professor, has described lynching as “a type of racialized, sexual violence that uniquely harms black men.”

The violence and repression of Jim Crow segregation emerged from laws written by a Mississippi congressman named James Robert Binford, who owned land in Township 22 North, Range 4 West, a few miles from the barn. Mississippians, including Binford, laid the cornerstone for Jim Crow with the 1890 state constitution, which added laws to the corruption and violence that had, up until then, kept white supremacy in place. Future governor James Vardaman said, “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n—— from politics.” The constitution accomplished its goals with brutal efficiency, and ten years after it was ratified the number of registered Black voters had dropped from more than 130,000 to just around 1,300. The new constitution reframed Reconstruction as an act of northern aggression. Soon the state passed textbook laws that controlled what information the children of the state could learn. That fight continues today. A dozen generations of students, including me, learned that Reconstruction was a violent military occupation run by corrupt and vile men intent on enriching themselves at the expense of the broken South. The Black citizens in our textbooks were described as naive, inferior pawns being used by outsiders. No consideration whatsoever was given in class to the idea that Black Mississippians might have enjoyed their newfound agency after the war.

By 1887 Confederate veterans were dying in clusters, more every day. That’s the year the first effort to build a Nathan Bedford Forrest statue in Memphis began, formalized into an association in 1891. Down in Mississippi, politicians took away the Black right to vote but added payments to Confederate veterans and their widows. The pervasive idea of the Lost Cause reframed the Civil War to be about states’ rights and not slavery. It turned the Confederate soldiers from traitors into American patriots defending the original ideals of the nation. This mythology took root as those old soldiers began dying in droves, another one every day, and their sons and daughters tried to sort out what their beloved parents had done in their lives and what they had done it for.

A sharecropping life was a subsistence life. In 1880, before the clearing of the forests began in earnest, only 16 percent of Delta farmers were sharecroppers. In 1910 that number passed 50 percent and a decade later would be 74 percent. The only way out of sharecropping was access to credit, and the caste system meant Black people had virtually no access to credit.

The first returning Black veteran to die, Private Charles Lewis, was killed a month after the war ended. In Pickens, Mississippi, an unnamed Black veteran paid a Black woman to help him write a note to a white girl. Local leaders found him and hanged him on the outskirts of town. They hanged the woman who’d helped with the letter, too. Enough people died that President Wilson wrote an open letter to the country about extrajudicial justice. The NAACP reported that between 1889 and 1918 more than 2,500 Black Americans were lynched, surely a significant underestimate. It was a period of intense racial violence, an outbreak of pogroms in at least twenty-five cities around the nation. Those months earned the nickname Red Summer, for the fear of communists and the Black blood spilled in the streets. There had never been large numbers of Black people in the urban North and Midwest. In Washington, DC, the mere rumor of an assault on a white woman brought out roving gangs of white servicemen and sailors. The DC Black community fought back, attacking random white people, a flicker of a race war until Wilson returned from his yacht trip on the Potomac to send in the army. Two hundred sharecroppers died in Elaine, Arkansas. Twenty-three people died in Chicago. There were two different mob attacks in Memphis. A lynching in Ellisville, Mississippi, was announced on the front page of the Jackson paper and all the factories within fifty miles closed so the workers could attend. As many as...

Buried violence is a perennial bulb that is fertilized by fear and watered by insecurity.

Many of these were placed, quite intentionally, on the lawns of local courthouses, sending a message about the law and whom it was designed to protect. Most of the monuments around the state were built during the brief but emotionally powerful cotton boom. Not a single courthouse statue in the state of Mississippi was erected after 1923. The Lost Cause was always about cotton and money.

Keeping the Carter kids uneducated was required to keep them compliant.

The unspoken issue at the core of the debate, he knew, was always sexual. It had always been about white girls sitting in desks next to Black boys. The southern farming class lived in mortal fear of Black men doing to them what the planters and overseers had done to Black women for two hundred years. The accusation, as it often is in Mississippi, was the confession.

That same day, 240 miles south of Senatobia, a World War I veteran named Lamar Smith had been encouraging Black people to vote in the upcoming runoff election. He stood in front of the Brookhaven courthouse with a box of absentee ballots, a tool that allowed voters to avoid the customary intimidation and violence at the polls. White politicians and bureaucrats worked hard to create a false narrative that absentee votes somehow wouldn’t count; the intimidation was a key part of the disenfranchisement plan. One witness said later that he heard Smith’s last words: “No white man is big enough to run me out of Brookhaven!” Someone shot Smith on the courthouse lawn at 10:00 a.m. in front of at least thirty white witnesses, including the sheriff, who let one of the alleged killers, Noah Smith, escape despite being covered in blood. A grand jury declined to indict any of the accused: Noah Smith, Mack Smith, or Charles Falvey. Nobody would testify. There was no law anymore.

Mississippi wound tighter and tighter. Almost no one noticed how wild the rhetoric had gotten until much later when historians started to try to understand this strange last stand.

The “step back in time to the summer of 1955” the family promised on the application was a trip into a parallel universe of erasure. If you drive to Money right now, there is a perfectly restored gas station designed to show how everybody got along back then, standing next to the collapsed wreck of a store where a fourteen-year-old boy whistled at a white woman and got tortured to death by a decorated combat veteran for it. Both are owned by the same family. As Dave Tell wrote, “While Bryant’s Grocery stands as an indictment of the Delta, Ben Roy’s is an apology for it. Thus we have nostalgia and ruins 67 feet apart from each other.”

The attorneys took notes, which ended up being discovered in an Ohio State archive a half century later, along with lots of other paperwork that revealed that most of what the public learned about the case, at trial, and in the famous Look magazine story that followed, had been invented by the lawyers to protect their clients first, and then to protect segregation itself generally, and to make sure Leslie Milam and his barn got written out of the history, since he remained vulnerable to prosecution. She sat in the Breland & Whitten law office in between the railroad tracks and the Sumner courthouse and described the events. That law office stands today with its long-dead founders’ names still painted on the window. She kept silent for decades.

Little men always worry first about their pride. Scared men worry about how other men judge them. It’s universal.

Teoc was home to the McCain Plantation, which is where Marvel McCain Parker grew up before she and her family moved to Chicago. It’s forty-eight miles southeast of the barn. Marvel didn’t grow up working on a white man’s plantation; her dad owned and farmed his own small square of dirt. Her people had been on this land, as enslaved people and then sharecroppers and finally owners, since before the Civil War. Most of what you can see down below from the bluff belonged to a plantation owner named William Alexander McCain, whose white descendants still own the large plantation that dominates the flat land below the Teoc bluffs. He had a white son and a Black son, splitting the family into two. The white son, named John Sidney McCain, had a son who became an admiral, who had a son who became an admiral, who had a son who became a Vietnam war hero and a senator. John McCain is the same rung on the family tree as Marvel’s father. In Teoc there are the white McCains and the Black McCains, all of whom share a common ancestor, which of course makes them one family. The mental and emotional gymnastics it takes to obscure that fact is roughly the amount of exertion that makes the modern state of Mississippi possible. During Senator McCain’s run for president he claimed he never knew his family owned slaves, which is absurd.

A cult is built on believing the absurd if the absurd justifies the cult.

There would be no justice in Mississippi. There would be no memory. There would be only silence and erasure.

Responsibility for the status quo falls on the heads of every single person benefiting from the status quo.

‘It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.’ ”

These new schools revolved around twin goals: to keep white and Black kids from becoming friends and making babies and to teach those white kids a newly invented gospel of the Delta, that there were good whites and bad whites, many more of the former than the latter. That was the creation myth of a new land stripped of everything that had happened since those first prehistoric native monocrop hunters moved south into the violent but nutrient-rich forest swamps. Generations of white Delta children have now been taught this myth from birth, including Jeff Andrews and me.

It was August 28, a holy day in Black America, which I did not realize until one of the speakers connected the dots for me. The anniversary of Till’s death, and of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, given on August 28, 1963, in tribute, and of the day Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president.