Why the 1955 murder of Emmett Till still remains shrouded in racism and mystery

In 2020, author and journalist Wright Thompson traveled to Drew, Miss., for a private tour of a barn with a bloody and tragic history that many in the Mississippi Delta would like to forget.

The barn is where, on Aug. 28, 1955, a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till was brutally beaten and killed by two (and allegedly more) white men, who murdered him for the sin of allegedly having whistled at a white woman at a nearby grocery store.

The barn and surrounding property was purchased in the 1990s by a dentist named Jeff Andrews, who despite growing up in the area insisted to Thompson that he knew nothing of its history before buying it. Even more surprisingly, he wasn’t concerned with his barn’s grim legacy.

“It’s in the past,” he told the author, as Thompson recounts in his new book, “ The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi ” (Penguin Press), out Sept. 24.

In fact, Andrews was convinced they could walk into any elementary school in the Delta and ask kids about Emmett Till and 95% of them would have no idea who he was.

Today, Emmett Till is a civil rights icon.

When Americans gather to protest racial violence, Thompson writes, “someone almost certainly carries his picture, held high like a cross, no name needed.” But in the Delta, Till’s murder has been “pushed almost completely from the local collective memory.”

Thompson knows this firsthand. He grew up in Clarksdale, Miss., 30 miles north of Drew, and he’d never heard about the barn until meeting Patrick Weems, who runs the nearby Emmett Till Interpretive Center .

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As Weems explained to Thompson, “If you go through Drew and stop and ask somebody, ‘Do you know where Emmett Till was murdered?’ I think nine out of ten people will say, ‘What are you talking about?’”

And it’s not just the white population trying to suppress the area’s sordid past.

Carl Watson, a black landowner who was born four years after the killing, just down the road from the barn, didn’t know the story of Emmett Till until his dad told him in the late 1980s.

“Several generations grew up seeing the barn every day and were never told about it,” Thompson writes. “White mothers and fathers in this part of Sunflower County didn’t talk about it. Black mothers and fathers didn’t either.”

For almost half a century, the “official” story of the lynching came from journalist William Bradford Huie.

He sat with Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam — who were acquitted by an all-white jury in 1955 of killing Till, and thus protected by double-jeopardy laws — and published their confessions in Life magazine a few months later.

Their version of events left out any mention of the barn, possibly to protect other accomplices, including the barn’s owner, Leslie Milam.

Over the years, attempts to preserve Till’s story, even the censored version, have met with fierce resistance.

Jesse Gresham, a local pastor in Drew, told the author he once discovered a locked school board office full of history books about the civil rights movement, where they’d been hidden for decades. “They don’t want to think about what their own parents and grandparents did,” Gresham said. “They didn’t want future generations to know they were snakes.”

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Weems shared a story about a teacher at the now-defunct Strider Academy — named after the sheriff who helped secure acquittals for Till’s killers — who assigned her students to do research on Till’s murder. “The kids came home and said, ‘Tell me about Emmett Till,’ ” Weems said.

The erasure over the years “has been blunt and brutally effective,” writes Thompson. The only copy of the trial transcript has long since disappeared.

The gin fan used to sink Till’s body in the Tallahatchie River was kept by a lawyer in Sumner “as a trophy” but he eventually threw it into a landfill.

The gun used to murder Till isn’t melted down or in a museum but is owned by a white crop duster pilot, whose father was gifted the murder weapon by Sheriff Strider. It still fires.

The grocery store in Money, Miss., where Till allegedly whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, is now owned by Harry Ray Tribble and his siblings, children of one of the deceased jurors from the 1955 murder trial.

He continues to insist that Till wasn’t actually murdered — and the body was planted by the NAACP “to make Mississippi look bad and further a communist agenda hell-bent on tearing down freedom,” writes Thompson.

The gas station next door, also owned by a Tribble, was renovated in 2014 as a visitors’ center for visiting civil rights tourists. It was meant to represent what life actually looked like back in Till’s time, but it actually “revels in the fictional nostalgia of a racially harmonious Delta,” writes Thompson.

There are no segregated bathrooms, but a jukebox where “white and Black people came together to share the communion of music.” There is no mention whatsoever of Emmett Till.

Sometimes even allies, those trying to keep Till’s memory alive, can misrepresent history.

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Wheeler Parker, 85, Till’s cousin and the last living eyewitness, once sat on a college panel devoted to Emmett Till.

He listened to scholars pontificate about his dead relative. When it was his turn to speak, Parker said, “I don’t think I know this guy you guys are talking about. It was beautiful but it wasn’t accurate.”

These people were taking the story and using it, Thompson writes. “Often for good, but using it all the same. Changing details, fudging details, moving things around, making Emmett look better, or Carolyn (the white woman Whitt whistled at) look better, exaggerations, justifications, white lies, mistakes.”

In 2008, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission erected a historical marker next to the river where Till’s body was found.

It was replaced at least nine times, after the signs were stolen, or thrown in the river, or covered in hundreds of bullet holes.

It was a tug-of-war in the shadows, Thompson writes, “with some people trying to preserve a memory and others trying, with guns, to erase it.”

A bullet-proof marker was erected in 2019, and the bullet-riddled sign was donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Plans for some sort of memorial at the barn have been longer in coming. Annual ceremonies have been held there every summer since 2022.

And last December, TV producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes, known for hit shows like “Bridgerton” and “Scandal,” announced that she was making a big donation to the Emmett Till Interpretive Center to help buy the barn from Andrews and turn it into a monument to Till.

A monument “would force a new conversation,” Thompson writes. “There is no heroism to remember here. No defiance. Nobody burst through the door in the nick of time, or risked their life for another, nobody stood up to evil, no one stopped the torture.”

It’s an uncomfortable reminder of our country’s shameful and violent past, but that’s exactly why this site needs to be preserved.

“The tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do,” Thompson writes. “It’s that the rest of us . . . never learn the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground.”

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