New book 'The Barn' revisits the people and forces behind Emmett Till's murder

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: The murder of Emmett Till is one of the most harrowing events in American history, serving as a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who in August 1955 traveled to Mississippi to visit relatives. His brutal killing would expose the deep-seated racism and violence faced by Black Americans, especially in the Jim Crow South.

The events leading to Till's murder began when a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, accused him of making an inappropriate advance toward her, an alleged brief interaction considered a grievous offense in the racially segregated South of the 1950s. Days later, Bryant's husband Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, abducted Till, brutally tortured and murdered him. They were later tried and acquitted by an all-white jury.

Now bestselling author Wright Thompson travels back to his native Mississippi for a fresh and unflinching account of the conspiring forces behind Till's murder, focusing on the place where it happened.

It's called "The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi."

I spoke with him yesterday.

Wright Thompson, thanks so much for being with us.

Wright Thompson, Author, "The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi": Man, thank you so much.

Geoff Bennett: Your family farm is about 20 miles from the site of the barn where Emmett Till was beaten and killed, yet you had to leave the state to go to college before you learned anything about it.

How did this history reveal itself to you?

Wright Thompson: You know, it was shocking to me all the things that personally I didn't know.

And then as I started researching the barn where Emmett Till was killed, I realized that most of America actually doesn't know a lot about this. This is a very famous murder, and yet there's been so much erasure and there's been so many intentional things stripped from the historical record that the book "The Barn" ends up being the story of this murder, yes, but also of the, like, long-going process of trying to erase this from memory and the activists who were fighting to keep that memory alive.

Geoff Bennett: Yes, well, tell me more about that.

The notion that this barn's obscurity reflects this whitewashing, this effort to cover up the horrendous nature of Emmett Till's abduction and murder and the complicity and the depravity of all of the people who were involved.

Wright Thompson: Well, one thing I certainly didn't know is that one of the key drivers of this very famous murder was political rhetoric, for instance.

Mississippi in 1955 had an unbelievable governor's race. It was a race to the bottom, frankly. I mean, you go read the things people were saying and it was just supercharged, violent, metaphorically violent rhetoric. And that election happened on a Tuesday, and Emmett and his cousins and friends went to the Bryant's grocery on Wednesday.

And so he was down there in the middle of an incredibly heated political campaign, where the only issue that mattered was school segregation and integration. And so I didn't realize until I started researching it what a role that really violent political rhetoric played in this famous murder.

Geoff Bennett: Well, over the years, historians and journalists have pieced together a deeper, more accurate account of what happened to him. What did you discover over the course of writing this book?

Wright Thompson: I mean, some really harrowing things.

I mean, I found out that the murder weapon was in a safety deposit box in a bank in Greenwood, Mississippi. I had Carolyn Bryant's memoir sent to me on a thumb drive, where she essentially doubles down and takes her lies to the grave.

The sheer tonnage of what we don't know is, to me, as much about the — as much a part of the story as the things we do now.

Geoff Bennett: On September 23, 1955, an all-white jury in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, acquitted the two white men who were charged with murdering Emmett Till.

And at the trial, eight of the jurors, a defense attorney, and the sheriff, it turns out, were all from the same extended family as the two men on trial, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam.

Help us understand that aspect of the story.

Wright Thompson: It wasn't two random people who killed another random person. I mean, it was a tribe of people killing the child of another tribe of people, which every West Point professor will tell you is an act of war.

These were folks who were all from the same very tight-knit community and the hills up above the Mississippi Delta. I mean, one of the jurors' fathers was J.W. Milam's contact when he joined the Army. Like, who's the person who'll always know where you are?

So, I mean, this wasn't just a jury of his peers, as they say. This was a jury of people who were part of the same tribe.

Geoff Bennett: You're from the region that you write about in this book. This book is part a meditation Emmett Till's murder. It's also part memoir.

How did unearthing and investigating this story help you reckon with your family's history?

Wright Thompson: You know, I love that. I think it's the Malcolm X quote that everywhere south of Canada is the South.

And so it was very important to me to learn my own family history. But I also think it's very important for all Americans to read about this square of land around the barn where Emmett Till was killed and think about their own square of land.

And I think that the project of continuing the American experiment feels to me rooted in the idea that we first have to agree on a common history. And I hope that this book is a tiny pebble in the lake of that and sends out some ripples.

But that was — that investigation, reckoning, interrogation, whatever the verb you want to use, is absolutely essential to this project.

Geoff Bennett: Wright Thompson.

The book is "The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi."

Thanks for being with us.

Wright Thompson: Thank you so much, Geoff.