The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child death, and racism.

In 1955, Rosa Parks read about the death of Till. When she later refused to surrender her seat for a white person, as required by law, Till was on her mind. In need of money, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant made their infamous confession to a reporter for Look magazine. In giving this confession, the two half-brothers protected Leslie Milam and the barn. This account of the murder, written by Bill Huie, became the “official record” and erased the barn from history (314). Years later, a student at Rhodes College in Memphis demonstrated the impossibility of the timeline provided in the confession. For a time, the barn returned to normality. The Shurdens sold the property to the Buchanans in 1961. The murder was never discussed, and the Buchanans did not learn about the murder until well after they purchased the barn.

In December 1955, Elmer Kimbell, who at a minimum helped to clean up the Till murder, shot and killed a gas station attendant, a Black man. Again, Kimbell was acquitted, prompting a white citizen to comment, “There’s open season on the Negroes now. They’ve got no protection” (330).

Thompson compares two events that occurred in the summer of 1964. Three young men from the East Coast went to the Delta to find the famed blues musician Son House. The same day that they located House by phone, June 21, “three civil rights workers went missing in Philadelphia, Mississippi” (318). The car of the murdered civil rights workers was found the day that the music fans arrived at House’s place. One group was collecting evidence of past injustices, while the other was trying to get justice.

While the old families continued to farm the land in Township 22, the towns were dying. Keith Dockery’s widow commented to Thompson that those who benefit from the status quo bear responsibility for it. The trial transcript for Till’s trial went missing. As late as 1971, a young Black woman, Joetha Collier, was killed when three white boys shot her from inside a truck. Only one of the white boys served time, and very little at that.

Carolyn Bryant divorced Roy in 1975. Roy ran a small grocery store in Ruleville, and reporters would find him every few years. He would yell at them. Thompson was born in 1976 and attended Lee Academy. The Academy was founded when de-segregation became mandatory. When Clarksdale, his hometown, re-opened its public schools in February 1970, 574 of the 585 white students had enrolled elsewhere. The new schools had two goals: preventing white and Black children from befriending one another or dating one another and teaching the white children “a newly invented gospel of the Delta, that there were good whites and bad whites, many more of the former” (325). These academies are dying in the 21st century and have integrated to survive.

The 1981-1986 farming collapse was the worst since 1929. The 1986 harvest finished the Shurden plantation. Mechanization and the fall of cotton in the global economy had already caused the Black population of Sunflower County to be cut in half from 1940 to 1980.

In the last days of his life, Roy Bryant was scared. The murderer of Medgar Evers had been sentenced to life in prison, and he feared that the law would come for him. He had cancerous tumors on his neck and throat. Toward the end, he confessed to a college student and claimed that Carolyn had been in the truck during the kidnapping. Till’s killers were ostracized by their community and died of cancer before long. In Mamie Till’s view, they got the death penalty for what they did to Till.

A documentary filmmaker, Keith Beauchamp, began to look for the barn. He found it, and Jeff Andrews and his wife confirmed it: “The barn had taken its first step into the light” (337).