The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

Black citizens called the Tallahatchie the Singing River because of all the lynching victims who’d been thrown into its dark water. Their souls sang out from the water, a wellspring of Black death and white wealth.

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.

Patrick Weems runs the Emmett Till Interpretative Center, or ETIC, in Sumner, Mississippi. His job is to make sure people never forget about Emmett Till’s murder.

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.

Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it. Once you connect all the dots, there’s almost nowhere they don’t lead. Which is why so many have fought literally and figuratively for so long to keep the reality from view.

Bill Gates is the third-largest landowner in the state of Mississippi.

That’s all a fancy way of saying bulletproof. They had to install a bulletproof sign to remember Emmett Till on the banks of the Tallahatchie River. The first sign, paid for by Morgan Freeman, was stolen and thrown in the river six months after being erected. The second sign got shot 317 times in eight years, so riddled with bullets that the Smithsonian has approached Weems about displaying it.

is where Michigan congressman Charles Diggs would stay during the trial, so he could represent his many Detroit constituents with Delta roots while also ensuring his safety at night. Howard slept with two pistols by his head and a Thompson submachine gun at his feet. His home bristled with weapons and men who looked willing to use them.

Meanwhile journalists looked for the Black men who’d been with Milam and Bryant during the murder. They’d vanished, too. Years later, a graduate student at Florida State would get law enforcement officials to admit that the men had been arrested under false names and kept away from the prosecutors in the Charleston jail.

Black reporter Simeon Booker had been with Jet magazine only a year. Almost everything history books tell you about the killing of Emmett Till is known because Booker reported it. He got to the story first, sitting with Mamie Till in a South Side Chicago funeral home, taking notes about her tears and her resolve. When she looked down at her son’s body and tried to find a part of him to recognize, Booker was there, recording her words. He wrote: “Her face wet with tears, she leaned over the body, just removed from a rubber bag in a Chicago funeral home, and cried out, ‘Darling, you have not died in vain. Your life has been sacrificed for something.’

Willie Reed thought about the cries he’d heard coming from the barn, thought about how impotent he’d felt hiding behind the well, weighed the cost of talking against the cost of his silence. If he’d have kept quiet, Emmett’s final hours would have been forever expunged from the American story.

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.

word Mississippian today carries many different meanings around the world, many of them born in the violence of 1955, but there was a time when the word had never been spoken. Then in the year 1719 one man made it code for extravagance, corruption, and foolish fiscal shenanigans. The man, named John Law, the son of a wealthy Scottish goldsmith, is the true founder of modern Mississippi. His plan first turned this wilderness into a global investment opportunity.

The instant millionaires became known in France as Mississippians. It was a slur, like calling someone reality-television famous, or new-money rich, or simply tacky, vulgar, and plain. One writer described them on the prowl in Paris: “the age of Roman corruption; furniture of gold and silver, dazzling jewels, precious odors, fountains of perfumed water, fruits from both continents, monstrous fish, marvelous automatons, half-naked courtesans.”

The bill’s opponents predicted the bloody future in frightening detail on the floor of Congress. Massachusetts congressman Edward Everett said, “The evil, Sir, is enormous; the inevitable suffering incalculable…. Nations of dependent Indians, against their will, under color of law, are driven from their homes into the wilderness. You cannot explain it; you cannot reason it away. And we ourselves, Sir, when the interests and passions of the day are past, shall look back upon it, I fear, with self-reproach, and a regret as bitter as unavailing.”

One of the leaders was Forrest’s former artillery captain John Morton, who many years later asked to be buried in his Confederate uniform. Forrest went to Nashville to visit. “John, I hear this Ku Klux Klan is organized in Nashville, and I know you are in it,” he said. “I want to join.”

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.

would become Continental Bank, bought a plantation in Mississippi. The president of the Illinois Central Railroad, Stuyvesant Fish, bought a ten-thousand-acre Delta plantation, along with U.S. Speaker of the House Joe Cannon, and they invited President Theodore Roosevelt on several bear hunts. On one of those hunts, when Roosevelt refused to shoot a tied-up bear, the term Teddy Bear got introduced into the national lexicon.

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.

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.

Black soldiers returned from the war changed. France, free from the South’s caste system, had been a revelation. They’d seen another way of living and came back wanting the same freedom they’d fought to give the British and the French. “We return from fighting,” W.E.B. Du Bois said. “We return fighting.”

Buried violence is a perennial bulb that is fertilized by fear and watered by insecurity.

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.

Supreme Court overturned the law in 1936, on the grounds that agriculture should be controlled by the states, even if the states had done nothing to try to arrest the thirteen-year free fall. The Roosevelt administration rewrote the bill to account for the high court’s reversal and it passed again. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 copied all the main provisions of the previous bill and added two new ones. First, it provided for crop insurance. Second, it instituted parity payments, which added a subsidy to the per-pound price of cotton to offset the permanent drop in the crop’s value and global importance. Everyone recognized that the next revolution would happen in science labs and petroleum wells, not in fields or factories, but many felt the families who had powered the old revolution should have their economic fall softened somehow. The government worked out the math to allow farmers to regain a standard of living erased by the collapse of the commodity market. Subsidies were given to make sure that falling crop prices and rising chemical and mechanical prices wouldn’t impact the farmers’ purchasing power. They picked a golden age of cotton—but before the boom triggered by the war—as the baseline: August 1909 to July 1914.

Molière was right: ‘It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.’

In between those dates, a federal judge demanded that Mississippi—sixteen years after Brown v. Board—finally integrate its schools. The moment had arrived. The ruling came on October 29, 1969. That date marks the real end of the formal Jim Crow caste system.