The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

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.