Even though Wright Thompson grew up in the Mississippi Delta, he was in college before he learned about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old child from Chicago who was tortured and murdered in the Mississippi Delta, and whose death helped ignite the civil rights movement. Due to subsequent, intentional erasure by the white community, Thompson himself didn’t know Till was murdered in a barn only 23 miles from his family farm until the pandemic. “I was working on a sports story and ended up on the phone with Patrick Weems, who runs the Emmett Till Interpretive Center. Then he said, have you ever been to the barn? And I said, what barn? And that’s how I got completely obsessed.”
To understand how he did not know about the most notorious civil rights murder in history, or that it occurred only 23 miles from where he grew up, Thompson set out to explore how local and national forces were involved in the cover-up. Gaining the trust of Emmett’s friends, family, and local community members, who continue Mamie Till Mobley’s mission to resolve that her son’s death would not be in vain, in The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, Thompson explores what exactly happened the night that Emmett Till died, the history of the region, the forces that aligned to erase what happened, and the implications for all of us.
Deirdre Sugiuchi: Growing up, what did you learn about Mississippi history at Lee Academy? Can you talk about what Lee Academy was, in the context of Mississippi and education?
Wright Thompson: Lee Academy in Clarksdale was founded during Christmas between 1969 and 1970, when the US government finally forced Mississippi to integrate. In many ways, I feel the simplest way to describe the segregation academy system is, [that white community leaders] were trying to create and teach a new gospel. Also, that everything that happened before 1970, let’s don’t talk about it.
Our Mississippi history book didn’t have a word about Emmett Till, and the one they teach now has 117 words, in which it frames the entire thing based on how bad the actions of these people—of Milam and Bryant and everybody else—made the white citizens of Mississippi look, not that a child was tortured and murdered. Anything bad that you might hear about was the result of a few bad apples; most Mississippians were good people who loved their neighbors and are very glad that all the late unpleasantness is behind us.
DS: One of the things I have been really shocked to realize over the years is how much racialized violence occurred in Mississippi, and furthermore, how much was kept not just from us but from our parents. Can you talk about erasure and memory in the Mississippi Delta and in the context of this history?
WT: My mom was in Shelby during the Freedom Summer when there was that march, and didn’t know it happened until I told her. That’s how much things were kept quiet. [Now] she’s really politically active on Facebook in a way that worries me. And what she said to me, was that she swore after she learned the history of everything that was going on around her, she would never be silent.
One of the things I hope this book does is it attempts to start drawing concentric circles of blame. The divide they want to teach you at Lee Academy or Pillow Academy is there were good people and bad people. Sure, there were some good people and some bad people, but mostly, there were brave people and cowards, and almost everybody was a coward. They knew what was right and wrong, but the threat of violence and of ostracization and of financial ruin.
The entire Delta runs on credit. You remember—there were all charge accounts because there was no cash in the economy until November when all of the crops were sold and the money started flowing back through the system to pay all these bills off. Everything was credit. And any Black people or white people who wanted to oppose it were kept in place—they just cut your credit off.
There were a lot of people protecting their family above doing the right thing, but they knew. One of the things that has been intentionally hidden from the children of the Delta is that that was a choice that your ancestors made and they made the one that helped them, but they knew it was wrong.
DS: You read of course, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, right? Or The Warmth of Other Suns? I felt, when I’m reading your book, the way I do when I read Wilkerson—of course, this is inevitable. Because people in the Delta (and America), they’ve just been playing these roles, and because we don’t talk about history, that’s why this keeps happening, right?
WT: The file folders in the Tallahatchie County Courthouse are empty. If you go to the Ole Miss Library and find the famous January 1956 issue of Look magazine—the Till story is torn out. It’s the same in Delta State, by the way. The erasure is intentional. When I first started doing the book, it was going to end after 1955. And then I met all of these people who are fighting the erasure, whether it’s Gloria Dickerson in Drew, or Patrick Weems in Sumner, Wheeler and Marvell Parker in Chicago.
While I was reporting the book, I got pulled into this circle of people who were doing this and just at some point pretty early on realized oh, this is not a history book. This is a current events book that is 1300 years long. It felt very present. Even the political rhetoric of the 1955 Mississippi gubernatorial campaign being so directly related to the killing of Emmett Till.
DS: Can you discuss?
WT: I mean that election was on a Tuesday, and he went to the store and whistled on a Wednesday— most people don’t realize that. I mean there is a direct line from August of 1955 to January the 6th. There is a direct line from Ross Barnett and James P. Coleman and Fielding Wright to Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.
DS: Or from James K. Vardaman to Donald Trump, right?
WT: James K. Vardaman and Bilbo. I was at Doe’s two weekends ago and the entire Percy family was there. People down here have been fighting Vardamans and Bilbos for generations. The political rhetoric is pretty startling. It just feels like a great big circle.
Every person of authority in my parents’ lives, and in your parents’ lives, told them a lie. And that lie has tremendous broad repercussions, but also tremendous personal ones for everybody, because everything your parents did to you flowed out of them using bullshit information that they were taught by someone else. That shit just perpetuates itself, and so you have blood, on blood, on blood, and it’s in the dirt. An excavation is required.
The books that really inspired me were Will D. Campbell’s Providence, or William Least Heat-Moon’s Prairy-Earth, or Absalom, Absalom! —the idea that American history is too big to hold in your hands. That’s why it’s so easy to manipulate by everybody who wants to use it for their own purposes. But if you could shrink it down, if you could shrink America down to 36 square miles, and tell the history of one square (mile) of dirt, and how it came to be, it wasn’t a couple of brothers who killed a child. It was one tribe of people ritually killing a child of another tribe of people to send a message. That is not murder. Any professor at West Point would tell you that is an act of war. And these fucking things are turning in circles because it’s deeply tribal, and it exists at a place beyond words, and it is all steeped in the dirt.
I feel the only way to really tell, was it Malcolm X said, “Everywhere south of Canada is the South?” I think what he really meant is everywhere south of Canada is Mississippi. And, if you can look at 36 square miles of Mississippi, then you can start to see the whole thing. I know that’s ambitious.
DS: No, I completely understand what you mean.
WT: We were part of the last of the old Delta, you know? There was no law when I was growing up.
DS: Oh, you mean criming while white? Is that what you’re talking about?
Until everybody can say this is what happened here, there is no future for the Delta.
WT: Just, when I was growing up, if you were drinking and driving, the cops would just follow you home and make sure you were safe.
DS: Yeah, criming while white. I went to the Delta a few weekends ago, to the memorial for Emmett Till. I brought a friend with me. She is Black. I was telling her about growing up white in Greenwood, and hanging out with my friends from Pillow, and how we did whatever we wanted, at least in regards to driving while drunk, or driving recklessly. But, if you were Black in Greenwood, it was a different thing.
WT: Well, those two places not only weren’t the same place. They had almost no relation with each other.
DS: Can you talk about that?
WT: It never occurred to me the energy it must have taken for me to live a nearly all-white life in a nearly all-Black place. And the fact that that couldn’t just happen didn’t occur to me until later—just the math, the law of large numbers, says that’s almost impossible.
It’s not surprising to me that our home has been such a fertile ground for the planting, nurturing, and growing of wild conspiracy theories, because the entire thing is based on an alternate view of reality, that if everyone agrees that they believe in it, then it becomes true. The thing about the Till murder—this is what the jury said happened; I’m not going to exaggerate, pump it up to make it funny or traumatic; this is literally the defense’s theory of the case that the jury believed — that the NAACP, in coordination with the Communist Party of Russia, had gotten a body from a Northern morgue. It was a 30-year-old man. They had thrown that body in the Tallahatchie River, hoping that it would be discovered and identified as Emmett Till.
DS: Yeah. When you are telling me that now, and even when I read it, and even, two weeks ago, when I went to the site in Money, thinking about it makes me so fucking sad every fucking time I hear it.
WT: It’s amazing how, even now, the history remains unknown. There’s an incredible amount of new information in this book, and it’s not because I’m Bob Woodward. It’s because there was so much erasure. It’s incredible how much remains unknown about one of the most famous murders in American history. And until everybody can say this is what happened here, there is no future for the Delta.
I struggle with this, because I’m still here in a way that you’re not. I have a much harder road to navigate. I’ve got land here that my daughters will own. In some ways, this book is an owner’s manual for them. I’m giving you this land, but I’m also telling you what happened here so that you can be a thoughtful owner of it. Because if the Delta is going to have any future at all, it is going to be in knowing and telling this story and every other story, and then saying, “Okay. We are one group of people who have been bound together by violence and by greed and by a lot of our own shit. But we’ve also been bound together by huge global commodity chains pressing down on everybody.”
To me, the essential soul of the Delta is in figuring out how to navigate those two opposing things. It’s not having one or the other— it’s always having both and trying to live in the contradiction of it. And so, anytime somebody tells me they love the Delta but they don’t want to hear this, I’m like, “You’re full of shit. You don’t actually love it, because you don’t actually live it. If you are not dealing with the complexity, you don’t live here.”
I dare you to read this book and then come talk to me.