The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

Rayner asked Mamie, gently, if she wanted his team to do some work on the body. Make it more presentable. “No,” Mamie said. “Let the world see what I’ve seen.” Rayner placed Emmett in a shiny casket. Three pictures of him from that Christmas photo shoot were pinned to the soft lining of the lid. More than fifty thousand people would walk past that casket at the funeral at Roberts Temple. Mamie was changing. Soon she’d emerge from this pain as a focused, relentless woman. She went out on the road and told her story to anyone who would listen. She spoke to huge crowds. Former sharecroppers and their descendants, just two generations removed from enslavement, listened in Detroit, and in Harlem, in Omaha, Nebraska—everywhere the diaspora had settled outside the South. The month after the funeral she’d visit thirty-three cities in nineteen states. At every stop she told the crowds her sadness had been replaced by anger.