The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“This book is my attempt to go beyond what is known and explore the unknown registers of a killing that, when seen clearly, illuminates the true history of our country.”

Given the importance of Till’s murder in the civil rights movement and American history, Thompson points out that there are gaps in the details of what happened. Those details are important, as they implicate several people in the crime and cover-up. An understanding of those details exposes the long history of The System of Racial Violence and Oppression.

“His dad never told him about the history of the barn even though they drove past it thousands of times.”

For decades, no one in the Mississippi Delta spoke of the infamous murder of Till. Those born after the murder, especially white people, were unaware of it or the significance of the grocery store in Money and the barn in Drew. Here, Thompson is referring to Jeff Andrews, who was the last owner of the barn before the Till Center purchased it. Andrews learned of the murder after he purchased the property.

“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.”

Despite the gains of the civil rights movement, racism and hatred remain realities. To confront these realities, the past must be confronted truthfully. Too often, white people in the Mississippi Delta have failed to acknowledge their role in the corrupt system of racial violence and oppression.

“The murder happened to a nation, and a race of people, yes, but it also happened to an actual family that still exists and deals with the fresh pain of Emmett’s death every day.”

Highlighting The Intersection of Personal and Collective History, Thompson emphasizes the terror and trauma experienced by all those who had known and loved Till. He follows their lives and notes the long-lasting effects on each of them. In doing so, he reminds readers of the real individuals at the very heart of the tragedy.

“The secret history of how the Mississippi Delta came to be defined by its rich land and poor people, by extreme structural value attached to dirt and a corresponding worthlessness attached to life, is the story of how a group of people all ended up in the same barn on the same night in 1955.”

Thompson traces the intersection of personal and collective history by highlighting how various wider social and economic forces made the crime possible. A long line of policy decisions allowed the Delta to be used for the purposes of the enrichment of the few and economic exploitation of the many, especially Black Americans. Poor white people, such as J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, resented the wealth of the planters and took their anger out on Black Americans. Till thus became their target.

“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.”

Corruption and economic exploitation defined the European settlement of the Mississippi Delta (See: Background). Corrupt Georgia legislators sold the lands to speculators against the wishes of their constituents, who voted them out. When the Supreme Court prevented the rescinding of the corrupt sales, the stage was set for the area to become a plantation economy based on enslaved labor.

“They grew up believing they deserved something that had been taken away. The central role of the next two hundred years of politicians would be telling this mass of Americans born into decline who to blame.”

Tracing the ancestors of J.W. and Roy, Thompson explains that they were unemployed after the Civil War and that their children were illiterate. They envied the wealth of the planter class and felt that they were victims. The murderers would focus their hatred and resentment on Black Americans.

“Black Americans learned to step off sidewalks and never make eye contact, especially with a white woman. Most of the customs dealt with sex; there has rarely been a culture in the world that spent so much time thinking about sex, particularly between Black men and white women.”

Strict social codes of behavior were put in place with the segregation statutes, or Jim Crow laws (See: Index of Terms). The obsession with preventing sex between white women and Black men made the Till case volatile. Thompson emphasizes this wider social context to make it clear that the dangers Till faced were not unique to him alone—the system of racial violence and oppression ensured that all Black Americans were automatically under threat.

“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. Without either of those urges, there wouldn’t have been family for Emmett Till to go visit, and there wouldn’t have been a barn where he would be killed.”

The destiny of Till was shaped by wider forces, such as wealthy capitalists exploiting the land and its people and governmental funding to protect the land from constant flooding. Repeatedly, Thompson emphasizes that the Delta was human made. Without the wealthy planters and capitalists investing in and benefitting from sharecropping, the story of Till and his family would have been very different, thus highlighting the intersection of personal and collective history.

“Nothing about the murder of Emmett Till was random. One tribe, related by blood and history, killed a child of another tribe.”

The murderers and the jury were connected in a myriad of ways, sharing the same family trees and culture. They all felt that their culture was under threat in 1955 and banded together. Thompson’s emphasis on the “tribe” mentality of the poor white people reflects how they regarded themselves as separate from—and superior to—Black Americans instead of embracing the idea of equality between all Americans as one indivisible group.

“Farming in the Delta had always been a profit center for outsiders, who controlled the dirt but never had to endure living on it, or dying in it, or being buried under it.”

Thompson identifies the connections between British manufacturers of clothing in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the Delta. To secure access to cotton, British investors purchased thousands of acres in the Delta. Their sole goal was to make a profit, and they had no concern for the people working the land or for its future.

“Gloria’s family, like so many Black families in the Delta, were as committed to the act of remembering as their white neighbors were committed to the act of forgetting.”

White people in the Delta did not talk about the history of the system of racial violence and oppression. They asserted, when asked, that it had no relevance in the present. Black Americans understood the importance of bringing this history to light for the sake of honoring the victims of violence and for bringing about real change. Gloria Dickerson and others demonstrated The Courage of Resistance in opposing the culture of silence.

“The policy of the government statutorily locked the Delta between August 1909 and July 1913. If it feels like the distant past here, that’s because it is.”

During the Great Depression, the US government artificially propped up the cotton industry by providing crop insurance and subsidies to farmers to make up for the drop in the price of cotton. The rates were based on the prices between 1909 and 1913. Without this governmental support, the cotton industry would have died sooner, and perhaps Till would have not had a reason to go south in 1955.

“Wheeler always talks about how the actual person he knew and loved has been erased over the decades and replaced with a symbol. Bobo loved pranks.”

Called “Bobo” by his friends and family, Till was a jokester who stuttered and had a great sense of fun. That real person, beloved by those who knew him, has been lost in the telling of this tragic tale. Both Wheeler Parker and Thompson seek to honor Till not just as the victim of an infamous crime but as the unique human being he was, reflecting the intersection of personal and collective history.

“These were tense days but by the end of 1955 more than four thousand Black Mississippians had joined. Those discovered to be members got their names printed in the local papers, which quickly led to firings, evictions, and a loss of credit.”

Speaking about the NAACP, Thompson describes the personal cost to Black Americans who were publicly identified as members. Despite that risk, thousands had the courage of resistance to join, determined to bring about change. The punitive response to those discovered to have joined speaks to the paranoia and defensiveness of white people at this time.

“If you drive to Money right now, there is a perfectly restored gas station designed to show how everybody got along back then, standing next to the collapsed wreck of a store where a fourteen-year-old boy whistled at a white woman and got tortured to death by a decorated combat veteran for it.”

The gas station sanitizes history, reinforcing the fantasy of racial harmony in 1950s Mississippi. The abandoned and dilapidated store tells the real story of a dying culture. Thompson suggests that this juxtaposition serves as an indictment of the Delta, which has sought to suppress the history of the system of racial violence and oppression instead of learning from it.

“The reporters arrived and Mamie told them her son was missing in Money, Mississippi. She looked at her silent mother and realized Alma had already given up. White men in the middle of the night meant death.”

While Till’s case drew national attention, the practice of abducting Black Americans from their homes and killing them was not unusual in the South at this time. The prevalence of the system of racial violence and oppression caused Black Americans to live in a state of terror. Till’s grandmother therefore recognized that there was little hope for her grandson.

“For a few news cycles the story got presented, even locally, as a pretty clear case of good versus evil, until the partisan political machine recast it as a battle between the NAACP and Mississippi white people.”

Initially, the story of a child’s murder penetrated the typical casting of stories of racial violence. However, very quickly, several people worked to change the framing of the issue. Thompson highlights how multiple people were involved in the cover-up of this crime.

“The jurors bought that story because they’d long ago given up logic and common sense. A cult is built on believing the absurd if the absurd justifies the cult.”

Explaining why the jury bought the far-fetched theory of the defense that there was a vast communist plot to harm Mississippi and undermine segregation, Thompson casts the white Delta as a cult. To justify the racial violence and oppression, white people had ignored what was right in front of their eyes. They were so invested in upholding segregation and white privilege that they would believe anything that ensured their continuing privileges.

“These two worlds, fighting for justice and searching for evidence of that justice through an old musical tradition, were one world. The same day the music fans arrived on Son House’s street the burned car of the civil rights workers was found in Mississippi. They had been killed.”

In 1964, efforts to advance civil rights in Mississippi were met with violence. Thompson identifies blues music as protest music, presenting it as a symbol of the courage of resistance. The efforts to celebrate that music are connected to the efforts to enfranchise Black Americans in Mississippi.

“The thing ‘not done’ was protecting a child, and then compounding that failure by not telling his story. Fewer and fewer people talked about the barn, even the people closest to it—perhaps especially the people closest to it—and slowly it vanished from memory, like so much else surrounding the actual facts of the Till murder.”

Speaking with Thompson, Keith Dockery’s widow reflected on the exploitation and inequality on the plantation. She noted that responsibility for the status quo falls upon those who benefit from it and added that we are accountable not only for what we do but also for what we do not do. Thompson recognizes this as the mistake that the white people of the Delta have made repeatedly.

“The image I can’t shake is Elizabeth Wright running desperate and panicked in 1955 to her neighbor’s house—the Bible makes clear the primacy of literal and spiritual neighbors—and begging the white woman there to use the phone, and her husband saying no.”

On the terrifying night of Till’s abduction in 1955, Elizabeth Wright went to her neighbor to call for help. Despite the dire circumstances, she was refused entrance. Thompson draws attention to the inhumanity of that response, which once more speaks to the system of racial violence and oppression in the Delta.

“It was August 28, a holy day in Black America, which I did not realize until one of the speakers connected the dots for me. The anniversary of Till’s death, and of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, given on August 28th, 1963, in tribute, and of the day Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination for president.”

It was on this date in 2023 that dignitaries and guests gathered at the river site where Till was found. One member of Till’s extended family was present. Finally, his story was being told truthfully in Mississippi, and a diverse crowd was honoring his memory. Many worked courageously to bring about this day, reflecting the courage of resistance.