‘The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi’
By Wright Thompson
Penguin Press, 448 Pages

In 1955, Emmett Till was 14 years old and growing up Black at Chicago, a part of the great migration of African Americans who had left terrorist southern states in the 1930s. His single mother did all she could to instill in him a sense of responsibility, and he showed signs of taking her teaching to heart. Then he went on a visit to relatives in Mississippi, whistled at a white woman, and his life was over.

To explain how it was that a Black youth was horrifically murdered in a barn at Money, Mississippi, Wright Thompson — who grew up not more than 20 miles from the murder site — feels called upon to explore the history of a state in which he could grow up not knowing about a death his white community did not want to remember, while the Black community was scared to openly do so.

Two of the murderers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were acquitted in hardly more than an hour by an all-white jury, instructed by a defense team that claimed Till was still alive at Chicago, where his family was funded by the NAACP.  Who really believed such nonsense? Perhaps no one, but the lie prevailed in a society determined to preserve the segregation outlawed in the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision little more than a year earlier.

Bryant and Milam, because they were white, had to be protected, at least so long as they were on trial. Their so-called betters, as they were referred to at the time — whites like those defense attorneys — counted on “white trash” to punish any Black person who dared to even look directly at a white woman.

Mr. Thompson recounts the biographies of Bryant and Milam, who grew up in a society that perpetuated the myths of Reconstruction — depicted graphically in “The Birth of a Nation,” the movie that showed uppity Reconstruction Blacks shoving white women off sidewalks and corruptly taking over southern state governments. As soon as the so-called white redeemers regained political power at the end of Reconstruction, their mission was to make sure Black people did not vote and did not assert their basic civil rights.

How to tell a Black boy who had not grown up in Mississippi what the novelist Richard Wright explained in his autobiography “Black Boy”: that he had to escape the South in order to live as an independent, self-respecting human being. Emmett Till’s mother tried to do just that, and she thought her son understood. Yet a fraught history going back more than a hundred years is not easily absorbed by a teenager of whatever color, and Emmett Till, for just a moment, forgot how he was supposed to act among southern whites.

It takes Mr. Thompson an entire book to explain how Till’s murder was not only possible but inevitable, given the caste system in the south, where even the lowliest whites like Bryant and Milam felt they had the prerogative to murder any Black person, of whatever age or sex, if that individual — really just a representative of his race — acted in any way that violated the code of white supremacy.

Mr. Thompson’s investigations show that Bryant and Milam did not act alone. Perhaps as many as 14 white men, one woman (the one whistled at), and possibly one Black man were involved in Emmett Till’s murder. White people were not willing to identify the murder site. Most Black people were too afraid to say anything or just moved away, often to the north, so that the coverup continued.

There are heroes in this story, especially the brave Black people who came forward, inside and outside of court, to give eyewitness testimony about the events leading to the murder. Generations of reporters, white and Black, kept doggedly on the track of what actually happened to Till and how he was bludgeoned and then shot to death. 

The barn itself, still standing, becomes on page after page the locus of a history that ultimately could not be erased. Mr. Thompson’s book also stands as that edifice of the truth that no amount of white supremacist idiocy can ever efface. 

Mr. Rollyson is the author of the forthcoming “Faulkner On and Off the Page: Essays in Biographical Criticism,” which deals with the Till murder and race.