Book Review: Wright Thompson Exposes Deep Racist Roots of Mississippi Delta in ‘The Barn’

“The barn…is long and narrow with sliding doors in the middle,” he writes Wright Thompson “No one knows exactly when it was built, but its cypress-plank walls were already damaged by the summer of 1955.”

What happened in the barn on August 28, 1955, changed history. It was there that a 14-year-old boy was tortured and pistol-whipped for allegedly whistling at a white woman. He was then driven to the nearby Tallahatchie River, where he was shot in the head and a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire to sink the body. The boy, Emmett Till, The actor’s body was buried in an open casket at his mother’s request, with his mutilated face visible to more than 100,000 people who came to pay their respects in Chicago. The image was widely shared in Jet magazine, but was withheld from the public by mainstream media. It was an image that Rosa Parks said she kept in mind years later when she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus.

Thompson returns to his native Mississippi (he grew up in Clarksdale, about 30 miles north of Drew, the town closest to the barn) and talks to dozens of people, drawing on the reporting of others to tell Till’s story, and uses the barn as a jumping-off point to explore the racist history of the Mississippi Delta. He traces the path of the barn’s land—legally marked on maps as Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West—from the Native Americans who were driven off it, to the British and American industrialists whose fortunes rose and fell with the price of cotton, to the sharecropping that impoverished generations of black farmers. Throughout the book, he pauses to reflect on his own personal history and the collective effort it took to cover up the details of Till’s story in this country’s stubborn refusal to confront its racist origins.

This is a powerful and uncompromising text. The Till case, while now famous, was not original. White Mississippians killed black people indiscriminately and without consequences for decades. The Supreme Court’s 1989 desegregation of schools Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 The case was largely ignored and helped at least partly trigger Till’s murder and the subsequent acquittal of the killers by a jury of white men. All five gubernatorial candidates that year, Thompson writes, vowed to “take every possible step to stop the most dangerous and immediate threat to the Mississippi way of life: a Negro child who wanted to learn mathematics.”

Thompson explores every facet of the story in depth, introducing characters at such a rapid pace that it’s often difficult to remember who’s who. There’s a helpful family tree at the beginning, which readers will return to often. What’s unforgettable about the end of Thompson’s book, however, is how much this country was built on the belief that some people were useless and expendable because of the color of their skin.

At the beginning of “The Barn,” Thompson meets Gloria Dickerson, a black woman who grew up in the Delta, left to build a career there, but returned in retirement to run a nonprofit that teaches Delta children their true history. Her duty to these children is simple. “Remember and do better,” she says. “Remember and make it better.” It’s the work of activists like Dickerson and books like “The Barn” that offer some hope that America can heal its oldest and deepest wound.

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