The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

Nathan Bedford Forrest had accumulated wealth as an enslaver prior to the Civil War, in which he fought. After the war, he experienced a financial loss and blamed Reconstruction. At an early organizational meeting of the KKK, he was named its leader. As Thompson notes, “The Klan was a well-planned terrorist organization, run by former high-ranking military officers” (119). It used violence to frighten Black Americans away from renting land and forced them into a life of sharecropping. Thompson remarks that the KKK attempted to win by terror what it had lost in the Civil War.

A financial panic in 1873 ruined Forrest. In 1874, there were 64 Black Americans serving as elected officials in Mississippi. Then, the KKK went to work, and the next election was done at the point of a gun. Only 16% of farmers were sharecroppers in 1880. Forty years later, that number was 76%. The decision of the state to sell more than 1 million acres of forest to private investors established a structure that ensured exploitation. 

Township 22 was largely sold to two large investors, Will Dockery and Taylor and Crate. Two very large plantations would rule for the next several decades. Dockery Farms became a force in the community, as Dockery owned 72,900 cleared acres and 215,971 uncleared acres in one county alone. Some 250 families would call his plantation home. This pattern of land sales linked global manufacturing and shipping in England with international bankers and the Delta. Thompson argues, “Nearly every conflict in the state’s history […] is rooted in the conflict between capital’s desire to multiply and the human desire to live free” (130-31).

In 1890, Mississippi re-wrote its constitution to establish the Jim Crow system of segregation. There was, as a result, a precipitous decline in the registration of Black voters. The new constitution gave rise to codes and customs for behavior, many of which dealt with sex. For example, Black Americans were not to make eye contact with white women. The 1895 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson gave legal cover for segregation.

The cotton empire worked by sharecroppers was made possible by northern and global capitalists as well as planters accepting governmental help to prevent floods. The government financed the expensive drainage projects. Without those two factors, there would have been no family for Till to visit in 1955.

In 1901, a monument was dedicated to Forrest in Memphis. Thousands attended. The barn land became a cotton farm in 1902. Blues music, the first American protest music, arose in 1904. Thompson notes that the development of the blues is evidence of the violence in Mississippi. In 1908, The Clansman, a play, opened in Memphis. It was later made into the racist movie The Birth of a Nation. The movie was a sensation in the South and glorified Forrest.

From 1900 to 1910, the population of Sunflower County in the Delta jumped 80%, largely because of an influx of poor Black Americans who were subsistence sharecroppers. Denied access to credit, there was no escaping sharecropping for Black Americans. Cotton prices soared during World War I given the demand for cotton uniforms. Huge fortunes were made at this time.

The peak of this boom in white wealth coincided with the first mass exodus of Black families from the Delta. More than 500,000 had left by 1920. The KKK was active in these years, murdering Black Americans for any violation of the strict codes. For example, a Black man was killed for sending a note to a white woman. The KKK considered rich planters, Catholics, Jews, and Black Americans as their enemies. The NAACP increased its membership from 9,200 to 62,200 from 1918 to 1919.

Thompson emphasizes the connections between the people in the Delta. In 1904, for example, Leslie Milam, the father of two killers of Till, socialized with Guy Thomas, a cousin of one of the jurors. There was nothing random about the killing: Both Leslie and Roy Bryant were angry at their loss of power and prestige and blamed that on Black Americans. In the Delta, the dividing line between wealth and poverty ran along Highway 51, which separated the Delta and the Hills. Both the Milams and the Bryants found themselves on the wrong side of this divide.

The cotton market collapsed in 1920. With the price of cotton in decline, membership in the KKK “rose dramatically” (156). Economic insecurity and fear bred violence. The industry, so critical to the Delta, was dying. In the 20 years before the collapse, several Confederate statues were erected. Thompson describes this as the “peak of the Lost Cause mythology” (157). After the collapse, one of Gloria Dickerson’s relatives, Son Ham, was lynched. 

It was commonplace in these hard times for white managers to cheat their workers. In 1923, a sharecropper named Joe Pullum insisted that the manager pay him his wages. When the manager refused, an argument ensued, and the manager and another were shot dead. A posse shot and killed Pullum, but not before he managed to kill several of his pursuers. 

After the incident with Pullum, there was a strict curfew for Black Americans. Boundaries increased, and “crossing one of those boundaries would be Emmett Till’s fatal crime” (162). In 1924, Leslie Milam’s house burned, which wiped him out financially. His son, also named Leslie, tried to buy a Delta farm in 1953. In short, the cotton collapse brought Moses Wright back to sharecropping, caused Mamie Till to move to Chicago, and put the barn land on the market.

After the stock market collapse in 1929, the Delta’s population shrank more, and abandoned shacks were commonplace. Small towns, such as Clarksdale, became the new centers of power in the region. These towns were dominated by poor white people who despised both Black Americans and the planter class. When the first synthetic fiber was invented in 1930, cotton’s fortunes declined even more. For the first time, farmers planted food crops to avoid starvation. 

In 1933, the federal government assumed control of the cotton industry. A federal law allowed for crop insurance and added a subsidy to the per-pound price of cotton. Without this governmental intervention, the cotton industry in the Delta would have died, and “there would have been nobody for Emmett Till to visit in 1955” (171). The governmental policy kept the Delta in the past.

Charley Patton, who had sung the blues and recorded records, died in 1934. No obituary was published in his honor. In 1936, the US government purchased the large Sunflower Plantation. The Farm Security Administration then sought to remove Black Americans from the Plantation and replace them with poor white people, who were given financial help. There were 115 Black families living on the plantation at the time. They would have benefitted from this program but instead were denied and forced to leave their homes.

On July 25, 1941, Mamie gave birth to Till, who was named after a beloved uncle. It was a difficult birth, and Till was nearly suffocated by the umbilical cord. Joe Dockery diversified his holdings in 1942, investing in oil and cattle. His plantation transformed into a farm, and machines increasingly replaced people. In 1943, the first cotton crop in history “made completely with machines” was harvested (179). What once took 74 hours to pick now took six.

J. W. Milam served in the Army in World War II. He was injured and recovered. Then, he graduated from an officer school and was commissioned as a second lieutenant. For that, he was given an Ithaca .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, which would later be used in the murder of Till.

During the cotton boom, Moses Wright owned land. He lost it in the stock-market crash. As a result, he found himself working for a man who mistreated workers and paid them poorly. Moses moved his family east in the Delta to an old landlord, Grover Frederick, who was fair. The Wrights lived in a large house and were able to save money. 

Till visited the Wrights when he was six years old with his grandmother Alma. They stopped in Cairo, Illinois, “for the Black passengers to move to segregated cars” (183). The rural life was foreign to Till. One day, the plantation manager came to get his hammer, which Till had borrowed. When the manager asked for it, Till asked for another minute: “Everyone panicked” (186), and Till’s grandmother quickly got the hammer.

Roy Bryant joined the Army in 1951, got demoted from private first class to private, and went absent without leave. On December 22, 1952, a plantation magnate sold the land containing the barn on credit to Leslie Milam and his brother J.W., who was removed as an owner a few months later. The Bryants and J.W. ran a network of stores catering to sharecroppers. They additionally were bootleggers, with J.W. pleading guilty to such offenses on five occasions. Not only had Roy Bryant and J.W. been arrested for assault and battery, but J.W. was credibly accused of killing four members of the Love family, who were Black.

Moses and his family lived between two worlds, the ancient and dying one of sharecropping and the modern one with new machines. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation by law in schools was unconstitutional. It would usher in another round of violence in Mississippi. Indeed, white Mississippi reacted “like an endangered species facing extinction” (192).

In Chicago, an extended family of Mississippi exiles enjoyed Christmas. Mamie was proud of what her family had accomplished and of her son, who was “on the cusp of becoming a man” (193).