The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

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

Emmett Till’s brutal murder was an example of systematic racial violence and oppression in the Mississippi Delta. Its timing in the summer of 1955 coincided with a frenzy of racial animosity and resistance to granting Black Americans civil rights in the form of integrated schools and voting. In emphasizing the wider historical and social context of the region, Thompson argues that Till’s murder was not an anomaly committed by a few “bad apples”—instead, it was a reflection of an entire system that oppressed and persecuted Black Americans. 

Following the Civil War, there was a brief period during which Black Americans held elected offices in Mississippi. However, the KKK became active in the 1870s, with its first grand wizard, Nathan Bedford Forrest, hailing from the Mississippi Delta. Formed by former Confederate officers, this terrorist organization used violence to suppress Black voting and force Black Americans into subservient economic roles or sharecropping. In 1890, Jim Crow was written into the Mississippi constitution, which created segregation by law. Strict codes of behavior for Black Americans followed, especially concerning how Black men acted around white women.

The laws and social norms were brutally enforced. A Black man could not look a white woman in the face. One Black man who wrote a note to a white woman was killed for doing so. There were no consequences for white people who lynched or murdered Black Americans for “violating” these codes of behavior or for white people who killed Black Americans for no reason at all. Knowing how racist the South was, Till’s family and friends reacted with fear and panic when Till, at six, told a white man to wait for his hammer or when he later set off firecrackers in town. Those who grew up in the Delta were all too familiar with the brutal consequences for crossing white people. Till, from Chicago, was not.

In the summer of 1955, white people in Mississippi were aghast at the prospect of school integration. Brown v. Board had already established the illegality of segregation by law in schools, and a decision about the timetable for its enforcement was imminent. The candidates for governor of Mississippi were all against segregation and called for violent resistance. Lamar Smith, a Black man, was shot and killed for distributing absentee ballots to Black Americans. White people held a celebration of Forrest, one of the KKK’s founders, in Memphis. 

It was into this super-charged atmosphere that Till entered. For whistling at a white woman, Till was kidnapped at gunpoint, brutally tortured for over two hours, killed, and thrown into a river with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck. He had a broken skull, wrist bones, and femur. His face appeared as though it had been axed. This horrific crime was then covered up. The all-white jury perceived the case as one in which segregation and its codes of behavior were on trial. The jurors voted to acquit. Following the case, there was silence and denial: Efforts were made to cast this case and all racial violence as the work of depraved white people rather than evidence of systematic oppression from which all white people benefited. 

Racial violence and oppression continued in the next decades. One of the jurors murdered a Black gas station attendant and was not charged. In 1964, three white civil rights workers were murdered. Schools remained segregated for decades, as white people formed private academies in the aftermath of the Brown decision. Thompson thus stresses how Till’s murder was part of a longer, and ongoing, history of racial violence and oppression. He argues that in order to bring about real change, Mississippi must confront the murder of Till in all its details.