The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

A forgotten landmark signifies silence and complicity in this sprawling history of the Emmett Till murder. ESPN journalist Thompson (The Cost of These Dreams) revisits the 1955 killing of Till, a 14-year-old Black Chicagoan visiting relatives in Mississippi, for whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. Till was dragged from his bed by Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, her brother-in-law J.W. Milam, and others, who tortured and shot Till and left his body in a river. Bryant and Milam were acquitted at trial and then, protected by double jeopardy laws, confessed to the crime in a self-justifying Look magazine interview. Drawing on his own interviews with eyewitnesses and their relatives, Thompson gives a chilling recap of Till’s murder and outlines the firestorm of publicity that made the case a civil rights touchstone, the willful amnesia about the lynching among whites in Mississippi, and the latter-day movement to commemorate the barn where Till died. The narrative also traces multigenerational histories of families associated with the killing as well as the underlying forces—land values and cotton prices—that ruled their harshly exploitative society. Throughout, Thompson combines meticulous historical sleuthing with dense atmospherics (“The darkness of rural Mississippi remains a physical thing, heavy and alive.... There is no safety outside the civilization of headlights”). It’s a vivid recreation of a shocking crime. (Sept.)