The Barn — Emmett Till, the boy whose murder still haunts America

Growing up in the South as a young Black kid, some things changed and some things never did. In the barbershops there was usually a picture of a white, blond, blue-eyed Jesus Christ. Over time, his likeness got curlier hair, darker skin and brown eyes. Sometimes Martin Luther King Jr’s picture was supplanted by that of Malcolm X, and sometimes they hung side by side.

One picture that always remained was of Emmett Till. Next to an open casket — in the famous September 15 1955 JET magazine photo — thousands of people, mostly Black, stood in line to view his badly beaten body and pay their respects. His brutal lynching, historians have suggested, was the spark that ignited the modern civil rights movement. The Montgomery Bus Boycott began just over three months after Emmett’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie river in August 1955.

Though the murder was a national scandal, Wright Thompson, a white author who grew up in the Delta, tells a full and trenchant story in The Barn of how a small community let it happen.

Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till, had left Mississippi for Illinois in the Great Migration. His father, Louis Till, died in Europe during the war, leaving Mamie and Emmett to survive alone on Chicago’s South Side. Mamie was protective of her only child. At the age of six he had contracted polio, which left him with a stutter. But as a teenager he begged her to send him south for part of the summer, to spend time with their cousins. After drilling him on the Southern way of life — what a Black boy could and could not do, such as look a white woman in the eye — in August 1955 she relented.  

Emmett arrived in Mississippi for a two-week stay with his great-uncle Moses Wright on August 21. On August 24, Till and his buddies went to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, in Money, Mississippi. That day it was tended by 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, while her sister-in-law Juanita Milam was in the back of the store, where she, husband Roy, half-brother JW and family lived.

What happened inside we may never know. Bryant said the lad flirted with her. Some said that as she went to her car — to fetch her gun — he whistled. His mother later said his stutter caused him to whistle when words were hard to come out.

At 2am on Sunday morning Roy Bryant and JW Milam, armed with a .45 Colt, knocked on the door of the Wright home, saying they were looking for “that boy who did the talking down at Money”. They woke Emmett and dragged him to their pick-up truck. When Moses’s wife Elizabeth went to a white neighbour, they refused to help. The Wrights never saw Emmett again. He was taken to a barn owned by JW’s brother, Leslie Milam, where he was beaten, brutalised, butchered — lynched.

Thompson’s book probes how this happened by asking why so many turned a blind eye. Plenty of whites who heard about that evil night in the barn kept quiet. Did those who remained silent become evil themselves?

Thompson unpicks the story of the Bryants and Milams, who grew up poor, and tells of how racism was intertwined with family trees through the areas surrounding the barn and beyond. Mississippi football legend Archie Manning, for example, the father of NFL quarterbacks Peyton and Eli, grew up not far from the barn. Thompson writes that “not a single story on Manning mentions this famous murder”. A few miles away there were Black and white descendants of slave owner William Alexander McCain. On the white side was John McCain, who became a Vietnam war hero and US senator. Thompson writes that McCain “claimed he never knew his family owned slaves, which is absurd”.

Thompson sums up his thinking: “The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understand that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view.” 

Till’s body was found in the Tallahatchie River a few days after his lynching. A local white farmer said “The river’s full of n——s.” Till was weighed down with a cotton gin fan wrapped by barbed wire around his neck. The left side of his head was torn apart. One eye dangled from its socket. 

At the September 1955 trial, neither Bryant nor Milam had money for defence lawyers. Thompson notes that their grocery store doubled as an illegal liquor store. White people called them “‘white trash’ and ‘peckerwoods’ and tried to steer clear”. But local white elites joined together, angry at how their towns were being portrayed. They convinced a group of lawyers to come to the defence. 

Mrs Till took the stand and spoke of her son’s character. She said she taught him to always say “Yes, sir”, “No, sir”, and if in danger to “Get on your knees if you have to.” A witness testified to seeing four white men and three Black men in the bed of a truck with Emmett’s body. He later saw the empty truck outside the barn where he had heard the screams of a boy.

The defence called Carolyn Bryant to the stand. She described a grown man, not a 14-year-old boy, who spoke clearly, saying “what’s the matter, baby, can’t you take it?” and “I’ve fucked white women before.” 

At the end of the trial, one defence lawyer, John Whitten, told the jurors he was sure that “every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men”. On September 23, the all-white jury met. They came back 67 minutes later — with a not-guilty verdict. There were no official court recordings. Journalist William Bradford Huie of LOOK magazine later paid $4,000 to Milam and Bryant for their story. They openly admitted that they killed Till. But there was no double jeopardy. 

The Barn renews a question all Black people asked: “Why was Emmett Till murdered? One cannot see the barn without being faced with that question.” But the book makes the case for the central importance of another unanswered question: why did all whites remain silent in the face of white brutality?

In 2018 the US Justice Department reopened the case. And in 2022, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, the nation’s first antilynching bill was signed. The original casket in which young Till was buried is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African American History and Culture. Lines are long. Mainly because people stay a moment to pay tribute but also because many are not familiar with what happened. Perhaps The Barn will bring the nation back to the understanding of the words of the founding director of the museum, Lonnie Bunch III. This is not just African-American history, this is “American History”.

The Barn: The Murder of Emmett Till and the Cradle of American Racism by Wright Thompson, Hutchinson Heinemann £25/Penguin Press $35, 448 pages

Maurice Jackson teaches Atlantic World and African American history at Georgetown University in Washington DC and Doha, Qatar

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