The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

The only way out of sharecropping was access to credit, and the caste system meant Black people had virtually no access to credit.

The United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917, and the sudden demand for uniforms and gun cotton drove the price per bale to record highs.

This peak of white wealth and economic power coincided with the first mass exodus of Black families from the Delta, and from all over the state, and the South.

Factories in the North sent hiring agents down south during the war to encourage Black families to leave the cotton fields and come to the cities.

In February of 1920 the cotton market collapsed.

The great Mississippi Delta cotton boom lasted twenty years. The suffering and killing and decay that would follow for the next century were the price of three great years and a dozen good ones. These two decades also marked the peak of the Lost Cause mythology.

Consider when all these Confederate statues went up around the state. Consider the history of cotton in the Delta. The land clearing finished around 1900. The price of cotton collapsed for good in 1923. And what happened in between?

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.

violence of Mississippi was detaching from its economic, social roots and was beginning to exist without cause or meaning, just a new fact of life.

The cotton collapse had moved all the pieces on the board: Mamie to Chicago for a new life, the barn land onto the open market, Moses Wright back into sharecropping, the Milam brothers off their land and toward the grocery-store economy of the Delta.

She surveyed the scene, convinced that Melvin had shot his wife, until she saw them both laughing hysterically as the Black man bled on the floor.

The caste system known as Jim Crow—invented by a landowner in Township 22 North, Range 4 West—grew hand in hand with the economics that required it.

Bobo loved pranks. He liked to tell jokes, too, forcing people to wait for the punch line even when he stuttered. On some level he had to know he was overweight, and maybe his humor helped combat whatever angst his thirteen-year-old mind cooked up in the mirror.

Rarely has a more cowardly collection of humans been put in the exact right place at the exact right time to do maximum damage.

One politician would say that what the state needed was “a few killings.”

witness told the FBI that he’d overheard Watson say he was going to kill Reverend Lee if he could get somebody to drive the car. That witness was the Belzoni chief of police, who didn’t lift a finger.

All of Hannibal’s elephants and Genghis Khan’s hordes lacked the world-destroying power of a bunch of first graders learning the alphabet and how to stay in line during the walk from recess to lunch. —

Pans of jerk chicken and fried fish, platters of ribs and barbecue spaghetti, filled the room with down home smells.

nostalgia. This collective act of memory, seen by historians as the second great wave of Lost Cause mythology, rose in defense of a stronghold under assault.

Mamie sent a healthy boy south and got a mauled corpse in return, but never forget that her loss “painted a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens.”

And now, somehow, Emmett is a martyr and Wheeler is an old man and a bright light cuts through the night, and the steam hisses and coughs.

killers, Noah Smith, escape despite being covered

if I had paused at that point for just a moment longer and let the other side of me win, and let Emmett lose? How long would his disappointment have lasted? A moment, maybe? I would have a lifetime to consider all that, one moment at a time.”

Chicago and sang a few warbly bars of Bo Diddley. He showed

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

The boys still went to Woodberry Forest in northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee country, where they relaxed after class on a Donald Ross–designed golf course on campus.

“What we’ve done and what we’ve left undone comes out pretty strong,” she wrote. “It’s embarrassing. Life just went on. And I recognize to my own sorrow that Molière was right: ‘It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.’

Frank Bryant, Roy and Carolyn’s son, graduated from North Sunflower in 1975. He played football for the Rebels.

There is no heroism to remember here. No defiance. Nobody burst through the door in the nick of time, or risked their life for another, nobody stood up to evil, no one stopped the torture.

the truth might make them feel. “At a time when there are those who seek to ban books, bury history,” Biden said as he made his own closing argument, “we’re making it clear—crystal, crystal clear”—the crowd’s applause stopped him for a beat—“while darkness and denialism can hide much, they erase nothing. They can hide, but they erase nothing.”

Nobody talked about it. Not white folks. Not Black folks. In other places it got studied in school, and discussed as a cautionary tale, but in the Delta, in the places where it happened, a curtain descended. Black folks whispered about it, maybe, and most white folks didn’t know the story.