The Barn Quotes

“The covering up of Till’s murder was not something that was perpetrated by a few bad apples. It couldn’t have been. 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 murder and the undeserved gift of his martyrdom. 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.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.’ ”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“I knelt down. The dirt felt cool as it ran through my fingers. Nothing hits the nose quite like freshly tilled topsoil, carrying the scent of life and death. The ground around here smells rotten after a rain, gray buckshot petrichor, grabbing tires and axles and feet. I’ve lost shoes in this mud. Delta folks call it gumbo and it feels hungry, aggressive even, as if it actively wants to pull more living things down into its stinking maw.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“A cult is built on believing the absurd if the absurd justifies the cult.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“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.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“The unspoken issue at the core of the debate, he knew, was always sexual. It had always been about white girls sitting in desks next to Black boys. The southern farming class lived in mortal fear of Black men doing to them what the planters and overseers had done to Black women for two hundred years. The accusation, as it often is in Mississippi, was the confession.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“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. This mythology took root as those old soldiers began dying in droves, another one every day, and their sons and daughters tried to sort out what their beloved parents had done in their lives and what they had done it for.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“The accusation, as it often is in Mississippi, was the confession.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“Buried violence is just a perennial bulb that is fertilized by fear and watered by insecurity.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“up, to interrogate the present to see what of the past remains. Because our present day potential for violence is alive and undiminished.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“cult is built on believing the absurd if the absurd justifies the cult.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“The Practice of Klanishness.” The enemies of the poor white men were made clear: planters and their “alien friends” like Catholics, Jews, and Black workers—along with big-business capitalism and Wall Street.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“This process required so much creativity that in the 1930s a Nazi law student came to study segregation at the University of Arkansas, looking for inspiration for Germany’s own new race laws.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“They all agreed on the following set of facts, as laid out by the defense: Emmett Till had been hidden by the NAACP in the North, in either Chicago or Detroit, and Willie Reed and Moses Wright had been coached by professional, probably communist agitators, and Mamie Till had played along with the plot in exchange for a life insurance payout for her not-dead son, and she’d flown down and lied about recognizing her son, lied about her tears and emotion, and all of this had been arranged by shadowy powers who wanted to overthrow the southern way of life as a precursor to an attack on the United States itself. The body pulled from the Tallahatchie River had been donated to the cause by a helpful mortician. These people had access to bodies, the defense attorneys had said. They would stop at nothing to attack Mississippi.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“The newspaper reporter summed up the rhetoric “on segregation all candidates agree, they support it….all five candidates tried to prove they were more racist than their opponents, a sprint to the bottom. All promising to take any measure to stop the most dangerous and immediate threat to the Mississippi way of life-which apparently was a black child who wanted to learn math. 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”.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“Less than a decade had passed since the murder, but a world had died. All that violence to protect a way of life, and in the end, it just crumbled to dust.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“I understood in that moment why a memorial for Emmett Till in the Delta wasn't just about justice or truth. Memorials in my homeland had always been about forgetting. Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, the Confederate dead on countless Mississippi courthouse lawns. But this memorial would be about remembering.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi