Opening the Barn Door: The Investigation of Emmett Till's Murder Reveals Deep Racist Roots in Mississippi | Books

“The barn… is long and narrow with sliding doors in the middle,” writes Wright Thompson in “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.” “No one knows exactly when it was built, but its cypress plank walls already were “Weathered in the summer of 1955.”

What happened in the barn on August 28, 1955 changed history.

There, a 14-year-old boy was tortured and pistol-whipped for allegedly whistling at a white woman. He was then driven to the nearby Tallahatchie River, where he was shot in the head and a cotton gin with barbed wire tied around his neck to submerge the body.

The boy, Emmett Till, was buried in an open casket at his mother's request. His mutilated face was visible to more than 100,000 mourners who paid their respects in Chicago.

The image was widely published in Jet magazine, but was kept from the public by the mainstream media.

It's an image that Rosa Parks said she had in her mind years later when she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama.

Thompson travels back to his native Mississippi (he grew up in Clarksdale, about 30 miles north of Drew, the town closest to the barn) and talks to dozens of people, building on the accounts of others to tell Till's story, and uses the barn as a starting point for exploring the racist history of the Mississippi Delta.

He traces the barn's lands – legally identified on maps as Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West – from the Native Americans who were driven from there to the British and American industrialists whose fortunes rose and fell with the price of cotton , to the tenantry life that impoverished generations of black farmers.

All the while, he pauses to reflect on his personal history and the collective effort required to cover up details of Till's story as this country stubbornly refuses to confront its racist origins.

It is written powerfully and unflinchingly. Although Till's case was now famous, it was not original. White Mississippians killed black people indiscriminately and without consequences for decades.

School desegregation ordered by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 was largely ignored and contributed at least in part to Till's murder and the murderers' subsequent acquittal by a jury of white men.

All five candidates for governor this year, Thompson writes, promised to “take every action to stop the most dangerous and immediate threat to life in Mississippi: a black child who wanted to learn math.”

Thompson delves deeply into every facet of the story, introducing the characters so quickly that it's often hard to remember who's who. It begins with a helpful family tree that readers will refer to often.

But what remains unforgettable at the end of Thompson's book is how much this country was built on the belief that some people are worthless and expendable because of the color of their skin.

There is a scene early in “The Barn” in which Thompson meets Gloria Dickerson, a black woman who grew up in the Delta, left the Delta and pursued a career, but returned in retirement to run a nonprofit organization that Teaches Delta children their true history.

Your mission to these children is simple. “Remember and do better,” she says. “Remember and do better.” It is the work of activists like Dickerson and books like “The Barn” that offer hope that America can heal its oldest and deepest wound.

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