The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

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...