Wright Thompson's new book tells the secret history of Emmett Till's murder in Mississippi
OXFORD — Author Wright Thompson's new book tells the story of Mississippi, and the entire nation, through the secret history of the murder of Emmett Till in Drew, Mississippi, in 1955.
Thompson stopped by Off Square Books in Oxford on Tuesday evening to discuss "The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi" in conversation with Gloria Dickerson, a Drew native who, along with her siblings, were the first Black students to integrate previously all-white public schools there in 1965.
Named for the barn in Sunflower County where Till was murdered, the book project began during the COVID-19 pandemic when Thompson, a senior writer for ESPN, was working on a story about Avery Bradley, who played basketball for the Los Angeles Lakers at the time.
Bradley has family in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and Thompson realized during research that one witness in the Till murder trial was named Amanda Bradley, so he set out to see if the two were related. It turned out they weren't, but Thompson had stumbled upon another story.
"In the process of figuring that out, I ended up on the phone with Patrick Weems at the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, and he said, 'Have you ever been to the barn?'" Thompson recalled.
"What barn?" Thompson asked.
They traveled to Drew to see it — the site of 14-year-old Till's lynching, an event that made national news and furthered the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement.
"It has a really bad energy about it, so I just was pulled to it and repelled from it at the same time," Thompson said.
These days, the barn is just a barn. It's used for storage, filled with Christmas decorations and hunting equipment, but it sparked an obsession that led Thompson to research and write the book.
"It just felt like it was a vessel that contained the history of the Delta, and Mississippi, and potentially the whole country," Thompson said of his inspiration for the book. "I just started doing this, and I couldn't even really tell you why except that it slowly consumed my life."
Undoing the erasure
The book is divided into four parts. The first act, titled "The Barn," tells the story of the murder through a man named Willie Reed who spotted Till, abducted and taken in the back of a pickup truck to the barn, and heard "the screams turn to whimpers and the whimpers turn to silence" as the boy was tortured and killed.
The second part, titled "Destinies," tells the 1,300-year history of "every person and every dollar in and out of" the 36-square-mile grid called Township 22 North, Range 4 West, where the barn is located.
"If manifest destiny is the root of the American psyche, there is a case to be made that the exact geographic center of the Mississippi Delta was the last place in the lower 48 to be settled, and the exact geographic center of the Mississippi Delta is Township 22 North, Range 4 West," Thompson said.
Part three, "1955," tells the story of Till's murder from a completely different perspective, but instead of approaching it as something inconceivable, there's a sense of menacing inevitability.
The fourth and final act, titled "Tomorrow," was a late addition to the book, Thompson said. He'd initially conceived it as a three-part project, bookended by stories of Till's murder — but then he started meeting people, many of whom knew Till and grew up reckoning with the reality of the racism that led to his brutal death.
With Till's murder having occurred 69 years ago on August 28, 1955, telling the story of the barn took on a sense of urgency.
"They're dying every day, the people who actually knew him," Thompson said. "It won't be long until there will be no human being left alive who actually knew Emmett Till."
Thompson, whose family farm is located just 23 miles from the barn, didn't even learn who Till was until he got to college.
"I didn't know, and a lot of people didn't know, and that wasn't an accident," Thompson said.
Not only has the full story gone untold for far too long, there have been intentional efforts to erase it.
From copies of the 1956 Look magazine, in which Till's killers admitted to having murdered him, with the ripped out in institutional libraries and empty trial file folders at the Sumner County courthouse, the erasure of the case is startling, Thompson said.
"So, the question you get is, 'Why are we still talking about this?'" he said. "And the answer is, 'Because we haven't started.'"
