The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, child death, and racism.

On August 28, 1955, Willie Reed was 18 years old. While many Black Americans had already left the Mississippi Delta, Reed and his family were working the cotton-picking season for Clint Shurden. In the dying days of this way of life, there were many abandoned shacks near Reed’s home. Reed heard a pickup truck approach and saw four white men in the cab and three Black men with a “terrified Black child” (6), Emmett Till. Reed was in the Delta town of Drew on land owned by Leslie Milam, a mean individual whom Black Americans loathed. In two hours, Till would be murdered.

The Barn’s author, Wright Thompson, was born and raised in the Delta town of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Thompson, who is white, had never heard the story about Till until he went to college out of state. The barn where Till was murdered remained but was pushed out of the white collective memory. Thompson notes that the Delta is man-made and that its defining idea is overlap. In the 21st century, Patrick Weems runs the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Mississippi.