In 2020, a long cypress barn near the tiny town of Drew, Mississippi, captured the attention of author Wright Thompson. Here, in the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was kidnapped and then tortured and murdered by a gang of white men. His capital offense? Allegedly whistling at the wife of one of his killers. It’s a story that’s been told by other writers, but in the hands of native Mississippian Thompson, the crime and the troubled soil out of which it grew take on a profound new resonance.
Thompson grew up a half-hour’s drive away, yet he never knew that a nondescript structure just 23 miles south of his family’s home was the site of a savage murder. What’s more: It was still standing, without a marker or sign indicating what transpired there. Thompson learned of the barn from Patrick Weems, a local activist who runs the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, an organization that was formed to push Tallahatchie County to acknowledge its fault in Till’s murder and the obstruction of justice after the crime.
“Ultimately it’s a book about the fight to erase versus the fight to remember.”
Interviewed from his home in Oxford, Mississippi, in an unmistakably Southern-accented voice that comes rumbling from a place deep in his body, Thompson tells BookPage, “As a Mississippian, I needed to know more about this barn.”
The result is The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, a deeply reported history rooted in that unique and specific piece of ground.
Drew is located within a 36-square mile segment of Sunflower County that, Thompson writes, has “borne witness to the birth of the blues at the nearby Dockery Plantation, to the struggle of [1960s voting rights activist] Fannie Lou Hamer, to the machinations of a founding family of the Klan, and to the death of Emmett Till.” The exact legal location of the barn is “Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, measured from the Choctaw Meridian,” a phrase that is repeated, occasionally in altered forms, more than 60 times in The Barn. Thompson says that by the time the book reaches its conclusion, he hopes his very intentional repetition “carries the swelling power of chorus.”
The Barn was a passion project, one that propelled Thompson through hundreds of interviews, some 100 visits to the barn, and archival research in places as distant as Spain and England. However, “this was not work,” he tells BookPage. “This was something I was going to do whether anybody knew anything about it or not.” Though Thompson is best known as a writer for ESPN, his last book, 2020’s Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last, revealed that his interests extend beyond the world of sports.
“I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one.”
After sketching out the story of Emmett Till’s murder and the predictable, yet inexcusable exoneration of the men who committed it, Thompson moves into a detailed economic and cultural history of that small patch of land the barn stands on and the territory surrounding it. Though his survey spans some 400 years, he homes in most on the period from the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 through 1933, the year Congress saved the cotton industry from collapse amid the Great Depression. In that era, he says, “cotton was oil,” and Mississippi “had a seemingly limitless supply of the world’s most important commodity.”
Thompson says that one crucial element of The Barn is its focus on people like Till’s cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., who was visiting Mississippi with Till at the time of the murder; Parker’s wife, Marvel; and Drew residents like Gloria Dickerson, who integrated the town’s school system as a child and has spent her retirement working to preserve the memory of Emmett Till and give meaning to his life and death. It was important to Thompson that he honor their efforts to secure justice for Till, he says, “because ultimately it’s a book about the fight to erase versus the fight to remember.”
The work of Till’s family members and Drew residents culminated in the 2023 authorization of a national monument to commemorate Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, whose insistence on forcing Americans to confront the brutality of her son’s lynching by allowing photos of his corpse to be published in Jet magazine galvanized the Civil Rights movement. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 and the murder of George Floyd a century later, the killing of Emmett Till is one of the most heinous racial crimes in an American history that’s deeply stained with them.
Thompson also candidly interrogates his own ambivalent relationship to his home state, writing that “the story of Till’s death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.” In this regard, he’s unsparing of his own ignorance. Near the end of the book, for example, he recounts his experience in a boarding school as a 16-year-old, where he festooned the walls of his dorm room with Confederate flags.
Questioned about his choice of decor, he says he had buried the memory for many years, but when it suddenly surfaced as he listened to a speech at an Emmett Till commemoration, he raced home to record it. When asked why he felt he had to take ownership of that long-ago episode, he admits some initial ambivalence, but then says, “Man, if you’re not doing this, you need to give the money back. If you’re not doing this, then everything you say you want this book to be is a lie.” The Barn is an eloquent antidote to Americans’ propensity to forget, and Thompson hopes there will be some healing power flowing from this work.
“The story of Till’s death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.”
“I’m a very proud American,” he says. “I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one. And seeing ourselves clearly doesn’t make us a lesser country, but a greater one. If the Mississippi Delta, and therefore America, has any future at all, it has to start with standing on one postage stamp of ground and saying, ‘This is what happened here.’ I certainly didn’t start off with that intention, but that became my sort of prayer for the thing. It’s not a book. It’s a map.”
Even as he expresses that ambition for his work, Thompson is notably humble in describing the product of his efforts: “I feel a profound sense of being a carrier of something, not the creator of it. There are going to be a lot of books written about this murder. There have been; there will be a lot more. So I’m very aware of being a tiny piece in a large mosaic of people still trying to understand how a 14-year-old child gets tortured for whistling.
“You can’t go back in time and stop it. But you can go back in time and understand exactly and specifically over the longest possible arc how all of these people came to be occupying the same piece of land on the same day at the same time in 1955. And I hope that answering that question adds to the mosaic, not just of that murder, but of every one like it.”
Photo of Wright Thompson by Evan France.