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June 4 - June 9, 2025
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.
Mound Bayou, the famous all-Black town founded by freed enslaved people.
I know it well, and I’d never heard about the barn until Patrick Weems told me I needed to take a ride, just as I had somehow never heard the story of Emmett Till until I went to college out of state.
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. There lies the true horror of Emmett Till’s
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Sheriff Strider was working to uphold the system. Sheriff Smith was working that long night to uphold the law.
“They’re all still blown away that this isn’t a big deal to us. It’s in the past. I mean, why would we talk about it on a daily basis? We’re so stigmatized by what everybody else thinks Mississippi is, but it’s like I told them today. I said, ‘I promise you,’ I said, ‘I can take you into the elementary school—like the first grade through sixth grade and we can poll all them damn kids who Emmett Till is,’ and I said, ‘I bet you ninety-five percent of them won’t even know who Emmett Till is.’
district. A northern Quaker charity would buy a house in Drew for the Carters, foiling the plan.
One of her missions in her hometown is to teach people that Emmett Till got killed in their community. The town had never, in any official or even unofficial way, acknowledged the lynching. She wanted her students to see the hidden history of their home, not to change how they felt about it, but to understand how it came
When were the fates of all these actors—Emmett Till, J. W. and Leslie Milam, Roy Bryant, Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter, Clint Shurden and his brothers, the Dockerys, the Forrests—written on some tablet atop some unseen mountain?
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.
Because the gun still fires, because the barn is a barn, because time is thin and fragile, because the dirt Jeff Andrews and I were taught to love is very different from the dirt Wheeler Parker was taught to fear.
Where Milam and Bryant saw a setting sun Till saw a towering sky. Where they saw boundaries to protect he was just beginning to see boundaries to explore.
The man, named John Law, the son of a wealthy Scottish goldsmith, is the true founder of modern Mississippi.
John Law’s perverted morals would define civic and financial life in the state long after his name slipped from popular memory.
The cotton gin, invented in 1793, turned cotton into the most valuable commodity in the mechanizing world, a place atop the global financial food chain it would maintain until the 1930s.
John had a son named Joseph who had a son named John Maylem, a new spelling. He graduated from Harvard College in 1715 and had a son named John Milam, the third and final name change, who had a son named Samuel who had a son named Jordan, a soldier in the revolution who had a son named John, a veteran of the Battle of
New Orleans, who had a son named Jefferson who had a son named Dave who had a son named Leslie who had sons named Leslie and J.W., who murdered a child in the family barn on the west half of section 2, in Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian.
Virginia politicians began seriously contemplating freeing enslaved people to get them off the plantation payrolls.
Had the Yazoo lands not been sold to speculators, who formed them into enormous plantations that were financed from London and New York—as opposed to the small forty-acre farms that would have likely
populated the South had the Yazoo sale not been validated—there never would have been a King Cotton. A train of humanity stretched down
The Panic of 1819 would build to another panic just eighteen years later, the bubble expanded by the same land speculation, the lesson unlearned. These two events led to Mississippi’s global reputation as a place that did not honor its word. As late as the 1930s the nation of Monaco was trying to get the delinquent state to pay its debts. No part of America had a worse reputation for bad credit.
On April 30, 1805, Fortunatus Bryan married Elizabeth DuPont at her sister’s plantation on the Congaree River in South Carolina. The bride came from the famous DuPont family.
That means, bizarrely, that the murdering half brothers Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam had different fathers but the same great-grandfather.
In all, eight of the jurors, the lead defense attorney, and the sheriff who drove the acquittal—and the sitting U.S. congressman from the district during the trial—were not just from the same place but from the same clan.
The Forrest family, busted and out of options in Tennessee, joined the same human wagon train that included the Milams and the Bryants.
Nathan Bedford Forrest carved out a wealthy life for himself as a slave trader and when war came in 1861, he felt compelled to defend his new life.
A year after the war veterans formed a secret society to try to scare newly freed Blacks and any whites who supported the federal government.
Sharecropping became a mutually-agreed-upon compromise that would get the crops in and out of the ground and still keep the international credit markets pumping cash into the Delta.
“Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n—— from politics.”
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.
Blacks learned to step off sidewalks and never make eye contact, especially with a white woman.
In the coming decades, a web of cleverly conceived and written legislation stripped away more and more rights from Black citizens, who’d come to numerically dominate the South because of the enslaved people who followed the western land rush started by the Yazoo scandal.
Their enslavers were the Taliaferro family, which had migrated west with the cotton frontier.
The white Taliaferro and Brown men had a multigenerational habit of raising unacknowledged Black families alongside their white ones.
born. A year later the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision cleared the way for total Jim Crow segregation.
The relationship between Chicago and the Delta was always a financial marriage.
This sharecropper cotton empire was a product of northern and global capital and the willingness of Mississippi planters to act like socialists just long
enough to protect and grow their farms.
In 1901 many of the men on the board of Sunflower Land & Manufacturing laid the cornerstone for a new monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis.
The term Lost Cause had first appeared in Mississippi newspapers just months after the end of the war and had become ubiquitous.
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.
In 1904 the local newspaper in Charleston ran an item saying that Guy Thomas and Leslie Milam spent Sunday together. That was March 6.
The daily lives of the killers and the men who freed them overlapped again and again.
In the coming fifty-one years, there would be many times when the families of the killers and the families of the jurors who would acquit them went to town together, built bridges together, attended weddings and funerals together, hunted deer and canned vegetables together.
One tribe, related by blood and history, killed a child of another tribe.
The Clansman was a play written by Thomas Dixon, based on his book, which had sold more than a million copies. In seven years, the play would find its way to the big screen with its new name, The Birth of a Nation, which gave a new life to the long-dormant Ku Klux Klan. The
show ran only fifty-one nights on Broadway. Crowds and critics in northern cities hated it. But in the South it became a sensation. The crowds especially loved the part in the second act when Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Grand Wizard of the Klan, strode across the stage.
