To say Wright Thompson’s latest book is about Emmett Till’s murder would be to undersell its scope and the author’s ambition. Thompson does investigate Till’s story, and he believes he has determined how many people were present at the scene of the gruesome murder, which has been a matter of some historical dispute. But, using the barn where 14-year-old Till was killed in 1955 as the focal point, Thompson widens the aperture to examine forces like the global economy of cotton, American expansion, systemic racism, and the complicity of a community. He explores how the collision of those forces perpetrated and then covered up the brutal murder of a Black boy in Mississippi. Thompson spent years reporting and building relationships with Till’s surviving relatives and friends, and interspersed throughout the narrative are his own reckonings with growing up white in the Mississippi Delta. While the nearly 400-page narrative occasionally meanders—you’ll learn a fair bit about blues music—The Barn is a sensitive, deeply reported book that will make you reconsider everything you thought you knew about Till’s lynching and its place in American history.
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