The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

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.”