WRIGHT THOMPSON The Barn: The murder of Emmett Till and the cradle of American racism. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck

Wright Thompson’s account of the 1950s murder of a Black teenager in Mississippi is also a reckoning with the history of his own family. 

Wright Thompson was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in September 1976, about 35 kilometres from the barn in Drew where Emmett Till was murdered in August 1955. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old African American who had travelled from Chicago during the summer of 1955 to visit relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Following a trip to a grocery store, he whistled at a white woman. He was subsequently abducted, tortured and killed. Thompson believes eight people were involved in his murder, including two African American men. The husband of the woman, and his half-brother, both of whom were white, were charged and tried. A jury of their peers took 67 minutes to consider their verdict and find them not guilty. Short of income, and relying on double jeopardy (the legal rule that once you’ve been acquitted, you can’t be tried again for the same crime), the two men confessed their guilt to Look magazine for $4000.

Emmett Till’s murder occurred during the time of the Brown v Board of Education decisions – May 1954 and May 1955, respectively – that ordered the desegregation of schools. Desegregation was strenuously opposed by whites in Mississippi and across the South.

White Mississippi was obsessed with sex. Thompson writes: ‘there has rarely been a culture in the world that spent so much time thinking about sex, particularly between Black men and white women’:

[Desegregation] had always been about white girls sitting in desks next to Black boys. The southern farming class lived in mortal fear of Black men doing to them what the planters and overseers had done to Black women for two hundred years.

That is the thing about hatred of ‘The Other’; it gives permission to rape. How much of the miscegenation so feared by whites was actually the rape of Black women by white men?

Following the second Brown decision in 1955, Democratic gubernatorial candidates competed over who was the best candidate to keep Black kids out of white schools. There was also talk of the need for ‘a few killings’, the use of ‘the gun and torch’ to keep schools white, and predictions of ‘coming bloodshed’.

Even though Thompson lived not far from where Emmett Till was killed, it was as if he grew up a million miles away. It appears that his parents didn’t talk about this episode of racial violence. As a young schoolboy he attended the Lee Academy, one of the private schools created by the Southern elites to maintain segregation and named in honour of Robert E Lee, leader of the Confederate Army in the Civil War. The school had a textbook that included a brief mention of Emmett Till’s murder, which escaped Thompson’s attention as a schoolboy. He subsequently tracked it down at his parents’ home when researching this book.

Thompson was a white boy unaware of the history of race relations in rural Mississippi where he was born and lived. He says he didn’t even know what a lynching was until he was almost 17, in 1993.

His parents sent him to a ‘fancy boarding school’, but he felt uneasy around ‘urbane fancy people’. To survive he concocted a persona as the guy from the Deep South and bought Confederate flags. He heard a song by Charlie Daniels called ‘Simple Man’, about stopping crime with a tall tree and a short rope. He liked the song and constructed a noose which he hung over a Confederate flag in tribute to Charlie Daniels’s song. His music teacher pulled him aside and laid into him, ‘mercifully’. The teacher provided him with a quick history of racial violence in the South, specifically in Mississippi.

I felt the floor drop out from beneath me, frantic and full of sorrow … In some ways I have never shaken that feeling … When I got home, miserable and empty, I started reading all the books in our house. A veil slipped from my eyes … This book is for that ignorant boy and for all the ignorant boys like him. Like me.

Thompson says that he never heard the story of Emmett Till until he went to college, almost 40 years after his murder. It would take him another quarter of a century before he started researching this book. During the COVID-19 pandemic he returned to Mississippi, declaring himself ‘a child of the Delta’. At the beginning of the pandemic he was taken on a trip by the Executive Director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Centre, Patrick Weems, a white guy with long hair, to visit the barn where Emmett Till was killed. He has visited the barn over 100 times since then.

He came upon information about his great-grandfather, who had founded a Citizens’ Council in Jackson, Mississippi. Citizens’ Councils were organisations opposed to desegregation; though less virulent in their opposition than the Ku Klux Klan. He had found a rotten branch in the family tree.

As the descendant of liberals and conservatives, of owners of enslaved people and civil rights crusaders, I usually find it slimy to judge them from the moral safety of the future. It’s trendy for southern writers to find a strawman ancestor in their past to malign. I find it generally disgusting. But the actions of a few of my family during this terrible year, when faced with an easy cowardly choice and a hard brave one, left a terrible stain on our name. On my name.

This realisation of the evil perpetrated by his ancestors has left Thompson with a feeling of something like emptiness, of never feeling whole; of knowing that the world can be never be put right. Thompson talks about the death of imagination and hope that descended on Emmett Till’s family following his death. He also refers to a young wide-eyed preacher ministering in Charleston and New Hope, Mississippi, at the time of Emmett Till’s killing. His belief in the innate goodness of people was crushed by the racial hatred of his flock. At age 34 he lost his faith, defeated; he never recovered.

What do you do when you reach such an understanding of the world, of how cruel it can be, how people can be so evil? You can call for people to reconcile their differences, as Thompson does.

As a white Deltan, it is my sense that most Black people have been willing to forgive the unforgivable and give all of us a second and third and fourth chance. The issue all along has been our unwillingness to accept it.

Wright Thompson has provided a comprehensive account of the broader forces that shaped the history of the Mississippi Delta and a history of racial hatred and violence in Mississippi and in America more generally, including a gruesome account of the torture and killing of Emmett Till, and the various persons involved. Perhaps most affectingly, it is an account of Thompson’s own place in the South and the place of his ancestors in American history and the struggle for civil rights. This book is a sad masterpiece that examines the soul of America and how it was found wanting.

Wright Thompson The Barn: The murder of Emmett Till and the cradle of American racism Penguin Books 2025 PB 448 pp $29.99

Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at the University of New South Wales who writes on industrial relations, sport and other things.

You can buy The Barn from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: 1950s United States, American society, American South, desegregation, Emmett Till, history of the United States, MIssissippi, murder, racism, Wright | Thompson