"The Barn" | Reviewed by William Winkler

In August 1995 Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy from suburban Chicago, was visiting a cousin in the Delta region of northwestern Mississippi. Unaware of the region’s taboos regarding interactions between Black men and white women, Till whistled at shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant. Three nights later Carolyn’s husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milan abducted Till from his cousin’s home, savagely beat him, shot him, and threw his weighted body into the Tallahatchie river.

One month later Bryant and Milam were tried for Till’s murder and were hastily acquitted by an all-white jury. Near universal outrage at the verdict (outside of the southern U.S.) sparked the earliest days of the civil rights movement in the country.

“The Barn,” by Mississippi journalist Wright Thompson, examines this act of brutality in light of the geographic, economic, and cultural forces leading to it.

Thompson begins with a detailed description of the Delta’s geographic history and the history of the people who settled it, many of whose ancestors still inhabit the region. He includes a detailed description of the realities of cotton-based agriculture which relied on cheap slave labor to be economically viable, leading to the dehumanization of a race of people brought to this country against their will.

He goes on to describe the events surrounding Emmett Till’s murder. Almost as soon as the trial concluded, a well-orchestrated effort to conceal the details of the event sprang to life, with the result that within years memories of the event remained only in the minds of those closest to it. The prevailing culture in the region made it unwise for those people to speak of it out of fear of retribution.

Thompson’s final section brings us to the present day and the establishment of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, maintained by the National Park Service, a tentative step toward healing in a region still deeply grounded in its history.

Wright Thompson lives in the Delta, a fourth-generation landowner whose family history includes ancestors who would likely have found no problem with the events of August 1955. His book bears evidence of his discomfort, but not shame, at his family history. But it bears equal evidence of his hope for his culture’s growing willingness to examine its past and apply it to the future.

Buy the Book.