The 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy who was abducted and lynched in Mississippi, is one of the most infamous crimes in American history. Yet, decades later, so much of what happened to Till is still widely unknown. Our guest this week points out that this is no accident. Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN and is the author of several books including his latest, “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi,” which is the subject of this week’s conversation. Thompson’s family farm is 23 miles from the site of Till’s murder, and yet he didn’t learn about some of the most shocking details until becoming an adult. Thompson joins to discuss what he uncovered while writing the book, his familial connection to the story and the reckoning that must happen if we are to heal one of the country’s original sins.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Wright Thompson: In some ways, reading this book explains why Mississippi or the South is like it is now. You can see it. And it’s that exact thing you talk about. You see it being created to protect people and then becoming its own inheritance. And it’s handed down and it gets cleaner and shinier the more of an heirloom it becomes. As it metastasizes, it grows more powerful, not the other way around.
And so that’s like, it’s really interesting the degree to which there’s some strange civic kabuki that goes on that we can’t seem to escape from. And, you know, I think, you know, Mississippi is a busted place. And the only hope it really has of surviving is if there’s some sort of new tribe of us where everyone and all of their stories are included. And we’re not close to that.
Chris Hayes: And welcome to “Why is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. The 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a black boy in Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi, is probably one of the most infamous crimes in American history, maybe even the most infamous crime in American history, along with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It’s also the inspiration for the explosion of civil rights activism that would come to define what we call the civil rights era.
It’s also a story about the country’s original sin, about how violent the nation was then and continues to be to this day. It’s also a story that gets passed down in textbooks as a lesson for children about the evils of segregation, the evils of the Jim Crow authoritarian regime in the old South. But it’s a story that, in some ways, is far more gothic, more fascinating, more complicated, and richer than I ever really realized.
And I say that having just delved into a phenomenal new book on the murder by Wright Thompson. He’s a fantastic writer. We’ve had him on the program before. He’s a senior writer for ESPN. He’s a jack of many trades. And he has a new book about the murder of Emmett Till. It’s called “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.” And Wright Thompson joins me now. Great to have you in the program, Wright.
Wright Thompson: Man, it’s a real pleasure.
Chris Hayes: Where are you from in Mississippi?
Wright Thompson: I am from Clarksdale, Mississippi. And my family’s farm is 23 miles from the barn where Emmett Till was murdered, which is the main character in this book we’re talking about.
Chris Hayes: I want to talk about the barn and how you kind of found your way to it, but I want to stay with your family and cotton. You come from a family that grew cotton, that has a cotton farm, if I’m not mistaken, right?
Wright Thompson: Yeah, it’s mostly soybeans now, just because the cotton market is in such bad shape, Mr. Donald Trump has destroyed the global commodity market and farmers still voted for him. So it’s staggering.
Chris Hayes: One of the things this book is about is about the history of a specific place and how that place produces the people in it and the choices they make. And before we get into it, I want to just talk to you and your relationship to Mississippi.
Wright Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Because one of the things that’s really interesting about this book and I think also about your writing is, I would say that you are an extremely perceptive, fair-minded, curious and open-eyed chronicler of the place you’re from. You also truly love the place you are from. You cherish many of its traditions. And I think you have just a fascinating and complicated relationship to being a native son, if I could say it, of Mississippi.
Wright Thompson: One hundred percent. I mean, I had lunch with Mississippians yesterday who have lived in New York for a long time. And that was our entire conversation at lunch, was loving it and hating it. And, you know, it’s both. I think it’s more interesting because it’s both, but I also think that, I mean, how much time do you have?
Chris Hayes: A lot.
Wright Thompson: You know? Yeah, I mean, it’s one of the central complications of my life. And, you know, I think that, I feel like what I write about over and over and over again is inheritance. And you know, I feel like even in the sports stories, there’s always a strong sense of place, which is me trying to figure out where people are from as a way of thinking in a more sophisticated way about where I’m from, you know. One of the things that I found really interesting that helped me understand my home through doing this book, I mean, I think this is the best way to answer the question. It turned out that I have this map of Mississippi that shows the railroads, the Illinois Central, and the Southern and the Yellow Dog, like all these different railroads, and they all just stop, and the land in between them is exactly where the barn is.
And so, and this is 1900, it’s unsettled, uninhabited hardwood swamp. And so, I think we think that, if Manifest Destiny is the wellspring of everything dangerous about the American myth and so much of what was done in pursuit of settling this continent. I think we all sort of assume that the country was settled somewhere way out west. But Mississippi, and the Mississippi Delta and the land where Emmett Till was killed was uninhabited long after the O.K. Corral, long after the tombstone, long after, you know, the census bureau famously declared the frontier closed.
And so like, I think this place, this hyper violent place being the place where the American experiment was completed helps explain why there’s so many complex histories flowing out of it. Like to me, that was the big revelation of reporting the book is that. I think lots of other people can make claims. You know, Greg Grandin’s great book, “The End of the Myth,” sort of talks about Texas. But you know, I think you can make a strong case that the last place settled was the Mississippi Delta. And I think the act of making those cases that really have something to teach us about the history of our country. I think that explains a lot of my own feelings of complexity.
Chris Hayes: Well, one of the things you do in the book is you spend some time on the physical makeup of the place, what the Delta is. And I wonder for people, I mean, the Mississippi Delta is famous in its own way. I mean, we all know it, right?
Wright Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It’s the place the blues were birthed. It has this kind of iconic resonance in American culture, partly because of so much music that came out of the Delta. But I don’t think people really know what it is. Like what is the Mississippi, explain to someone who doesn’t actually know what the Delta is, physically what it is and why that’s significant.
Wright Thompson: Okay, so it is actually not a river Delta. It is an alluvial plane, which is just a fancy way of saying a floodplain. And so it is, it’s sort of geographically, it’s all or part of 18 counties and it’s a teardrop shape. And it’s from about Memphis to Vicksburg. And the Mississippi Delta is very famous, but the Arkansas Delta, sort of Helena, Arkansas, where the King Biscuit Blues Hour was broadcast, that’s also part of it. And it’s millions of years of silt being distributed by the Mississippi River flooding, made it really, really fertile and therefore valuable farmland.
And the thing to think about it is, the best way for a modern person to think about it is, Until the 1930s, cotton was oil. And so all of the practices we think of now with oil and you know, the predatory extraction of it and what that does to places and people, the best way to think about it is that Mississippi was the center of a global commodity chain. You know, and it moved around the world.
And so one of the things about Mississippi that we associated with cotton so much is that it got hit twice. So the Mississippi Delta, the edges were settled by the river during the Civil War, but most of it was not. And so, you know, it moved from the American South to Egypt, to India, and it moved around the world, and it came back to Mississippi. And that was one of the cotton centers of the world when I guess DuPont invented synthetic fabric and petroleum replaced cotton as the world’s most dominant commodity.
And so the Mississippi Delta, like you said, it’s the home of the blues. But if you go there now, it looks like a place where there was a failed experiment. And the experiment was the global marketplace once moved through there, took its 10 percent profit margins, and left just wreckage in its place, and left the caste system that had been created to claim and protect those profits.
I mean, Money, Mississippi, where a funnily named place, where Emmett Till famously whistled, the money planning company was owned by Charles Merrill of Merrill Lynch. You know, one of the things I think the book does, hopefully well, is that it centers Mississippi in a global food chain. You know, in many ways, Mississippi was a colony of Manchester, Liverpool, London, and New York City.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, this idea of it as this extractive place enmeshed in this global commodity supply, and also the boom bust that had this boom of King Cotton before the Civil War, that cotton comes back around to it in the Delta later.
Wright Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: I had read Sven Beckert’s book, “Empire of Cotton,” it’s amazing book, but I had not realized or had not, I think I’d forgotten about the kind of boom bust, boom bust that cotton had come through twice and that it gets to the Delta later. I hadn’t quite realized or remembered until I read your book.
Wright Thompson: Yeah, and that the blues is rising at the exact same time. I mean, so the blues comes out of the last gasp of cotton, you know? And so, the price collapsed for good. The price of cotton, at least last night when I looked at it, was like 69 or 70 cents a pound right now. And in 1919, it was a dollar a pound.
Chris Hayes: Oh my God. That’s like freelance rates.
Wright Thompson: Dude, it’s unbelievable.
Chris Hayes: Like back in 1980.
Wright Thompson: Like, no shit. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: 1980 is like Esquire magazine, four bucks a word.
Wright Thompson: No, I know. I’m like, these motherfuckers were paying Jay McInerney what? Like, you know, you’re like, my God. So yeah. A Big Mac was 75 cents and he was making $5 a word from Vanity Fair.
Chris Hayes: Exactly. So, cotton was more, even in nominal terms, obviously massively more in real terms, but more in nominal terms in 1919 than it is now.
Wright Thompson: Oh, yes. And so, one of the things that’s really interesting about that, and there are many things, but the farm subsidies that were created by FDR, which exist in different form, but sort of not. It’s sort of the same system that was the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which was then overturned by the Supreme Court and repassed as the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1936.
And one of the things that it did was invent something called parity prices that the current farm subsidies are based on, which by the way, Donald Trump wants to get rid of. I mean, he’s just going to destroy the American farmer, but you know, I’m like, anyway, Jesus Christ. And so, but one of the things that’s really interesting about that is that they wanted to protect the purchasing power of a farmer from like 1916 to 1919. And so one of the things that I found out is that if it sometimes feels like the Mississippi Delta is stuck in time, it’s because statutorily it is. You know, they’ve locked all of these things in place. The market wasn’t allowed to work.
You know, Mississippi has been a ward of the federal government since 1933. And I think one of the reasons, and the way that like in the South and probably in all of America, the accusation is always the confession. I think like the deep anti-government, federal government sentiment that runs through Mississippi is rooted at least somehow in the fact that they’re a ward of the federal government, the whole state.
Chris Hayes: When did you first come upon “The Barn,” that is the title and the central place in the book?
Wright Thompson: It was during the pandemic and I was working on a story about the Los Angeles Lakers and I was doing the family tree of every member of LeBron’s Lakers. And so, I got to Avery Bradley. I love Avery Bradley, by the way. The coolest thing that happened in this book is Avery Bradley is not on social media. I got a message from him through an intermediary and the intermediary was the rapper, Chamillionaire. It was unbelievable. I got this message. And it was just like, and by the way, all I could think about was Tina Fey on 30 Rock.
And like, so anyway, but Avery Bradley’s family is from Mound Bayou, Mississippi, which is a famous town in its own right. It’s an all-black town that was founded by the freed enslaved people who worked on Jefferson Davis’s brother’s plantation. And so they founded an all-black town called Mound Bayou, which is very close to the barn. And it’s where the black reporters in Mamie Till stayed during the trial because you could be safe there. T.R.M. Howard, who’s a famous civil rights figure is from there and was the doctor in town. And so Avery Bradley’s whole family is from Mound Bayou and one of the witnesses in the Till murder was a woman named Amanda Bradley. And so —
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Wright Thompson: And so, I thought for a minute. I just wondered like, hey, is there any way that Avery Bradley’s related to one of the witnesses to this murder? He’s not. But in the process of running that down, I was on the phone with an organizer in the Delta named Patrick Weems, who’s central in the book. He runs something called the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, where the trial was. And he said, have you ever heard about the barn? And I said, what barn?
Chris Hayes: And tell me about the barn.
Wright Thompson: So, the barn is, it’s a local dentist barn. A guy named Jeff Andrews, he’s lovely. He’s really, really kind to all of the Till family members who want to come out there. But it’s just his barn, like his Christmas decorations are in it. So it’s very odd to see an angel and a cross there. Some 9.9 horsepower Johnson outboard motor. It’s just a barn that sits on the Drew Ruleville Road. And one of the things that really unlocked all of this for me, I mean, like I think my favorite two novels are “Absalom, Absalom!” and “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
And so, and I love that it rains flowers in my condo. Like, you know, I just think that like there is, I think magic realism is needed sometimes to really understand the Mississippi Delta. And so one of the things I found out is the barn sits on the Drew Ruleville Road. The Drew Ruleville Road was built by a road commissioner named Aaron Forrest, who lived on it. He was a colonel in the Confederate Army. He served in his brother’s cavalry unit, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
And according to local histories, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry marched down the Drew Ruleville Road, going from, I think, Helena to Yazoo City during the Civil War. And so, in some universe where time doesn’t work the way we think it works and it’s not linear, you know, in some multiverse, those horses pass J.W. Milam’s two-tone 1954 green and white Chevrolet pickup truck night after night after night after night after night.
And so, the book tells the history of the 36 square miles of land around the barn as a way of putting all of these things that happened there in conversation with each other in a way that helps you try to understand all the blood in the dirt that caused more blood to be spilled in the dirt. I mean, that was the project, if that makes any sense.
Chris Hayes: What did you know, what did you learn growing up about Emmett Till?
Wright Thompson: Nothing. I went and found my old textbook just to make sure that I wasn’t making this up and not a word.
Chris Hayes: So wild.
Wright Thompson: Dude, like, hang on, do you know what they’re learning right now? I’m going to read you something. This is what they’re teaching in my old high school right now. I went and got it. So, this is the current textbook. This is the only thing that says anything about Emmett Till. In 1955, J.P. Coleman, an attorney general from Choctaw County, was elected governor in Mississippi’s first general election after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Coleman promised to keep the school segregated. He proved to be a moderating force during a very difficult time.
Dude, just wait. Just after the election, Emmett Till, a young black man from Chicago, allegedly made a pass at a white woman in a rural store. Two men kidnapped him, beat him, killed him, and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. The coverage of the trial and acquittal of his accused murderers, who later admitted their guilt in an article in a national magazine, painted a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens.
Chris Hayes: Wow. Oh, wow.
Wright Thompson: Today that’s happening right now.
Chris Hayes: Painted, that was the takeaway.
Wright Thompson: Yes, that’s the takeaway of this murder.
Chris Hayes: The take —
Wright Thompson: Is that, and so.
Chris Hayes: So yeah, you got nothing. It wasn’t.
Wright Thompson: No, and it was interesting because my dad was a civil rights lawyer, so we were isolated and I didn’t. It’s interesting because I didn’t really understand then why. I just thought people didn’t like that we voted for different candidates. I didn’t really understand how connected everything was. And I mean, you know, like let’s not give me a pass, by the way, because like I lived an almost completely white life and in an almost completely black place. And it never occurred to me that that was weird or to try to ask questions about how that could be. Do you know what I mean? Like the caste system worked and it continued to work long after people were actively trying to dismantle it.
And so, one of the things I wanted to do is write the book that I wish I’d have been handed, you know. And like that was really important to me. I mean, it’s one of the reasons I’m so militant about making sure it finds as big an audience as it can. I mean, this story matters. And people don’t realize that the 1955 Mississippi governor’s election, when you go back and read it, you can go to newspapers.com and just read the stories. These people were saying crazy shit on the stop, Chris. I mean, just like, it was insane.
And it reminded me a lot of our last election. I mean, what they were saying was unbelievable. And so some people heard it and were appalled. Some people heard it and knew that like, politicians are frankly just, you know, small men and women. you know, a lot of times. And so some people just understood that’s who they were, but some people heard it and took them seriously. And so the election was on a Tuesday and less than 24 hours later is when Emmett Till and his friends went to that store. And so you cannot separate violence in Mississippi from politics. You know, there’s a reason that John F. Kennedy gave his famous civil rights speech and the next day, Medgar Evers got shot.
These things are forever connected in that way. And so like, you know, I believe what are the cool kids call it intersectionality, but like, you know, I felt like, you had to tell the whole story of how people came to occupy the same place on the same night if you were going to try to explain how any of it happened and then what trauma was caused by it happening.
Chris Hayes: Let’s just talk about the basics of the murder.
Wright Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And the case. And I’m going to sort of lay out my understanding of it before I read your book. And what I would say is the kind of, you know, the two paragraph canonical version you get, I think in let’s say Northern schools —
Wright Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — which is that he was a teenager from Chicago. He goes down to visit family members in Mississippi, in Jim Crow, Mississippi. He goes to a candy store with a cousin, I believe, or friends. And he is alleged to apparently maybe did whistle at —
Wright Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — I think the white woman who was minding the store, right?
Wright Thompson: Yes, and it was she and her husband owned the store.
Chris Hayes: She and her husband owned the store, and that was it.
Wright Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And a few days later, the husband and conspirators come to the house he’s staying in, kidnap Emmett Till the child, bring him to the barn, torture and murder him —
Wright Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — ditch him in the river.
Wright Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: They are subsequently tried and acquitted by an all-white jury. And then when the body of Emmett Till, desecrated as it has been, is brought to Chicago, his mother insists on the casket being open so that the world can see the depredations of white supremacy in the Jim Crow South.
Wright Thompson: Yeah. So that is all correct. As a counterpoint, here’s the defense’s theory of the case. This is what the jurors unanimously voted happened. That the communist party in cahoots with the NAACP got a body out of a morgue in either Chicago or Detroit. They weren’t sure. And beat the body up, tied a gin fan around its neck, threw it in the Tallahatchie River with the hopes that it would float so that someone would discover it. And that Mamie Till did have a son named Emmett who was alive and well in Detroit and that she had agreed to participate in exchange for the life insurance money. And that all of these witnesses, lifelong sharecroppers were like, deep communist plants who had come down to disparage the good white people of Mississippi and that it was a plot. And that’s what the jury said happened.
Chris Hayes: What’s amazing about that, and again, I hadn’t quite encountered that in that form until your book, is it reminded me, we use this term, the big lie, to refer to Donald Trump talking about winning the election in 2020 in which there had to be some like ghost of Hugo Chavez hacking the voting machines and Chinese —
Wright Thompson: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — you know, bamboo paper and Italian satellites, right?
Wright Thompson: That right.
Chris Hayes: Like this totally ludicrous set of things that’s not really plausible in any way, right? And the reason we use that term is in reference to Nazi propaganda about how people will believe a big lie rather than smaller ones. And I was just reminded in reading this. I mean, the sheer obvious ludicrousness of this lie, this complex conspiracy theory of just how enduring that truth is about conspiracy and authoritarian violence and how married they are.
Wright Thompson: They are inseparable. And like, you know, so during the last election and through this one, I was either writing or promoting this book. And so like, I have been living with the parallelisms for a really long time. And I just kept being like, nothing has changed.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Wright Thompson: I mean, it just was, it’s baffling honestly, but conspiracy theories that protect your own myth and the story you tell yourself about yourself cannot be too absurd.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Wright Thompson: You will believe anything rather than have a hard conversation with yourself.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: The way the story is told, a lot of it is about the strength and heroism of Mamie Till, because she —
Wright Thompson: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: — takes this very difficult decision, which is clearly true. But what I think is so compelling about your telling the story in the book is that the heroism of the people close to the murder, Willie Reed particularly, Willie Reed should be famous as a moral beacon of the ages.
Wright Thompson: And is not, no.
Chris Hayes: Until I read your book.
Wright Thompson: Dude, Willie Reed should be on money. They should name aircraft carriers after Willie. I am not kidding.
Chris Hayes: Yes, so —
Wright Thompson: So for people who don’t know Willie Reed.
Chris Hayes: Yes, explain, explain Willie Reed.
Wright Thompson: Dude., so Willie Reed, 18-year-old sharecropper, that Sunday morning comes out of his house, is going to cut across the mile in place to go to a country store to get some stuff for breakfast, to bring home for his family to cook. And the pickup truck with him and Till in the back of it turns in front of him. And he hides behind a well, and he listens to the screams and then listens as the scream turn to moans turn to silence.
And he is faced with a decision. I mean do I say something? Everyone in his family, by the way, told him not to. His grandfather was like, don’t say anything. And then Willie saw a picture of Emmett Till in the newspaper. And he just thought, God, that could be me. He testifies. He is forced out of Mississippi. I think he lasts two days after he testifies. He has to walk in the middle of the night out to Highway 8 where a NAACP activist is waiting in an Oldsmobile 88 to drive him to the Memphis airport.
The guy driving the car by the way was Medgar Evers and takes him to the Memphis airport. He goes up there. He has a nervous breakdown. He changes his name. He meets this wonderful woman named Juliet. They are together, I want to say 12 or 15 years, before she knew he had another name. And she found out by accident or he would never have told her.
And so he did not live happily ever after. His grandfather had to leave the state too. And every time the weather got real bad in Chicago, Ad Reed (ph) would turn to Willy because I told you not to say anything. And he lived with this trauma and never talked about it, ever. His wife was glad when she learned because it explained why he would scream in his sleep. And then in 2003 or 2004, the FBI calls him and said, hey, we are thinking of reopening this case.
And so if they did, they needed him to come back to Mississippi and go through all of his testimony. And he did. He and Juliet flew to Memphis. The FBI met him. They took him to a hotel in Tunica where the casinos. Juliet wouldn’t go to barn. She stayed at the casino and the FBI picked him up. Dale Killinger was the special agent in charge of the investigation. I mean he is a hardcore guy. He was 75th Ranger Battalion, you know, combat chumps, I mean the real thing.
And they drive to the barn, and Dale tells this story so poignantly, that Willie sort of like lost his balance standing in front of the barn, like just the speed with which the past and the life not lived and sort of the ghost ship of his life came hurdling at him. And they watched Willie Louis become Willie Reed again. And he was an old man and all of the sharecropper houses that had been everywhere around there had all been torn down. Mechanization really ended that world. Nobody he used to know still lives there. Everything is gone, but that barn is still there.
And it really messed with him. I mean Juliet said he went back to the casino that night and they just played slots in silence. And he just never got over it. And I think there is a thing in our culture now where we like to pretend that doing the right thing brings rewards. And one of the lessons and in any deep dive and in the history of this murder is that, that is just fundamentally not true.
Everybody had their lives wrecked. And you know, Willie Reed, his wife, Juliet, is still alive. She lives in Englewood, on the south side of Chicago, and she’s great. She’s incredible. But like Willie should be on money. Like that guy, there should be a statue with him somewhere and there isn’t. And so like I find it enjoyable to talk about him because the more people who know his story, I think the better off we are.
Chris Hayes: My understanding also is that, and maybe I didn’t quite get this right, but it just seems that he’s the fulcrum, he’s the portal through which this murder enters the world. I mean it very well could have just been a body was found and that was it. That there was no trial, that all of it comes from him having the courage.
Wright Thompson: Well, there is no open casket. And so one of the reasons the barn has been so written out of the story is that famously there was that Look magazine story that came out in 1956, which was completely stage-managed by the defense attorneys. I mean I have quotes that appear in that story coming out of J.W. Milam’s mouth. And if you find William Bradford Huie’s notes, they were actually said by one of the defense attorneys.
I mean, you know, and so it is just fiction. But they couldn’t tell the real story because it was Leslie Milam’s barn and he was an unindicted co-conspirator, and they couldn’t out him because he could have been tried. So, they wrote this fictional history of the murder that endures. When the secretary of the interior came down to Mississippi for her official tour, as they were considering if and where to put in Emmett and Mamie Till-Mobley National Memorial that Biden signed into law, when they were doing that, she was being told a lie in one of her stops by well-intentioned people who just are still telling the fake story. And so the barn was almost erased anyway by the time I came to it and the only reason we know that it happened and the only reason we know what happened to Emmett Till is because Willie Reed ruined his life to tell it.
Chris Hayes: Tell me the fake story. So Look magazine pays the two men who were acquitted.
Wright Thompson: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So those two men are?
Wright Thompson: It’s Roy Bryant, who’s Carolyn’s husband.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Wright Thompson: And his half-brother, J.W. Milam.
Chris Hayes: So, they are the two men that stand trial and are acquitted.
Wright Thompson: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: They are the two men that give this paid story to Look magazine basically a year later.
Wright Thompson: That’s exactly right. And the story it just is made up. It has Emmett like saying all sorts of crazy stuff to them. They go to a different barn that they just made up. And so, you know, the whole story is made up. And it’s really, it’s kind of infuriating when you start seeing how much it’s made up and that story, it still exists. I mean like I said, the secretary interior was told all sorts of things that just weren’t true. And was sort of like, we’re still doing this?
Chris Hayes: I have been to civil rights sites in the country, in the south, particularly. And in some of those places, there is kind of like a small, you know, there is like a tourist infrastructure and industry around it. Montgomery, Alabama is one of those places.
Wright Thompson: Oh yes.
Chris Hayes: You know, the bus boycott, there is now, of course, the incredible lynching museum down there.
Wright Thompson: Which is just unbelievable.
Chris Hayes: Yes and that’s a place that, you know, that history is kind of front and center. If you visit Montgomery, it’s part of the history. The barn, both physically the actual barn and this story, you kind of argue, I think, persuasively is, it’s like a black hole in the place where it happened.
Wright Thompson: Well, one of the things that happened almost immediately was this sort of shame-rooted erasure. And you know, one of the main tensions of the book is the sort of forever American cosmic battle between memory and erasure and between myth and memory. And, you know, if you go to the Ole Miss Library, although I have told this story enough that maybe they fixed it by now, but if you go to the Ole Miss Library and find the 1956 Look magazine, they have the magazine, but the story is torn out.
Chris Hayes: Amazing.
Wright Thompson: If you go to the Delta State Library in Cleveland, they have the magazine, but the story is ripped out. When the FBI got to the Tallahatchie County courthouse to reopen the case, the folder was empty. There has been a systematic attempt to erase. And that makes the sort of work of Emmett Till’s family members like the late Simeon Wright and Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr. even more important and impressive because there have been people standing in the breach of that erasure.
They put up a sign along the side of the Tallahatchie River and it got shot up. So then, they replaced it and it got shot up and then they replaced it and it got shot up hundreds of times. That sign is in the Smithsonian right now. And the sign that is there currently is bulletproof. The family of one of the jurors owns the store and they would not permit a sign to be put on their property. So, it sits just across the property line, the sign at the store in Money.
Uh, the barn, like I said, is just a guy’s barn. And so one of the things that has been happening, that was happening while I was reporting the book, is a group of people, we learned Marvel Parker in Chicago and Willie Williams and Patrick Weems in Mississippi are really pushing and fighting to preserve these memory sites for that exact reason. Because like the land, one of, I think, the central thesis of the book is that the land tells the story. And they are trying to make sure that this land forever tells that story.
Chris Hayes: You have done events in Mississippi, you are from Mississippi. You live there, right, you live in Mississippi?
Wright Thompson: Yes, I do.
Chris Hayes: What’s the reaction been like to the book?
Wright Thompson: You know, surprisingly positive. You know, I have a family member who I was worried about and as opposed to them being pissed off, wrote me this really lovely note. I think, knock on wood, but I think it’s working. I think people are reading the history and are allowing themselves to be open to the facts and to all of the things, those facts tear down and/or built. Like, I genuinely think the people who are coming to it are reckoning with it. That’s what I see. William Bradford Huie’s stepdaughter came up to me in an event in Memphis. I wish I had known she was there. I would not have trashed him so hard and to talk, I felt really bad about it.
Chris Hayes: Remind us who William Bradford Huie is.
Wright Thompson: He wrote the Look magazine story.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Wright Thompson: And so his stepdaughter came up. It was very Southern and polite, but she was pissed. Yes, I wish I had said it now. I need to ask but like, you know, uh, Ralph David Abernathy’s son came up to me in Atlanta, like that was unbelievable, that’s like, oh my God. The reaction, it fills me full of hope, if that makes any sense.
Chris Hayes: You use the word shame to describe it. And the psychology here is complex because I think one of the weird things that happens, one of the kind of psychopathologies around, I think, oppression and violence is people do know it is wrong. It’s like, I think we can tell a story that’s exculpatory, that like they did not know is a very polite thing. But like, they all knew, the people —
Wright Thompson: Every —
Chris Hayes: — kidnapped and murdered this boy knew it was wrong, the people that were around it knew it was wrong. At some fundamental level, they knew it was wrong. And the knowledge of that wrongness then produces these defense mechanisms, the conspiracy theorizing, the shame, the erasure. I think this question of guilt, you know, is so powerful and I see it all the time in our politics now.
People get defensive and sometimes, understandably, I get defensive when someone says I did something wrong. I get defensive, that’s just the way I react. I do not love it about myself, but it is a hundred percent the way I react. I just wonder how you thought through this very impacted thing that happens, particularly over generations of that defensiveness, that sense of shame, that knowledge that something wrong happened, the defense mechanisms that get built up around it.
Wright Thompson: I mean in some ways, reading this book explains why Mississippi or the south is like it is now. You can see it and it’s that exact thing you talked about. You see it being created to protect people and then becoming its own inheritance and it is handed down and it gets cleaner and shinier the more of an heirloom it becomes. As it metastasizes, it grows more powerful, not the other way around. And it’s really interesting the degree to which there’s some strange civic kabuki that goes on that we cannot seem to escape from.
And, you know, I think Mississippi is a busted place and the only hope it really has of surviving is if there’s some sort of new tribe of us where everyone and all of their stories are included. And we are not close to that. I mean, you know, it’s not that funny a joke, but like people talk about microaggressions. I am like, you need to come to Mississippi, they are macro.
Chris Hayes: Yes
Wright Thompson: Do you know what I mean? These things are still being enacted and I use that word very specifically.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: One way to understand contemporary American politics is the, I will say this provocatively, the dixification of all of American white, rural culture.
Wright Thompson: Yes, I see more Confederate flags in Upstate New York than I do in Mississippi.
Chris Hayes: I mean it’s wild. I mean you see it. I was at a July 4th in Michigan a few years ago and I mean the dixification of American white, rural culture, both in that specific way, Confederate flags but also just a kind of national culture whose sensibilities are rooted fundamentally in that soil, that’s been kind of, because of how American cultural development has happened, has become weirdly the kind of base defacto culture of a huge swath of white folks, which is weird because it used to not be the case. I mean these regionalisms were profound and distinct. And the Lutherans in Northern Minnesota had a sort of different vibe than the folks in Kansas, you know. And yet now, it has become more of a monoculture rooted in Southern culture.
Wright Thompson: It is shocking because my first reaction, it’s embarrassing, but my first reaction when I see a Confederate flag in Upstate New York is you fucking posers.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Wright Thompson: But seriously like the thing that, so one of the arguments in the book that I think runs through it, and this is really depressing, but the defense attorneys were very clear about why they took this case on and why they thought it was important to win, and that they were fighting for a culture. And Mamie Till was doing that as well. And one of the heartbreaking things is if you follow the thread long enough, they won.
Chris Hayes: The defense attorneys.
Wright Thompson: Yes. And that the thing you are talking about is absolutely true and was what they wanted.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Wright Thompson: And so it took them 70 or 80 years, but the arguments made in that courtroom have everything to do with where we currently find ourselves. And so this was a 70-year project that, you know, if in some ways the civil rights movement was born in the murder of Emmett Till, so was the dixification of America and this idea and like those things have been doing battle ever since. And the thing you are talking about is, I’ve noticed that too. I have never articulated it that cleanly, but like that is real and that is happening. And I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why, other than there’s people who are selling it.
Chris Hayes: Yes. It’s been profitable. I mean it’s something, it’s adjacent to another question that I wrestle with, and I know this is really, really near and dear to your heart. You know, how to wrench certain parts of what we might call white culture away from its most reactionary manifestations, you know.
And part of this, I’m saying white culture in a way that’s like a little provocative, but SEC football culture is complicated. It is white and black culture. It’s a culture that people —
Wright Thompson: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — across the racial divide rally around, but of course is always embedded with some pretty gnarly hierarchies and —
Wright Thompson: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It feels to me that the kind of political polarization and sort of cultural polarization that they are tracking in the same way, and there are fewer and fewer spaces that might be places where those divides get bridged. And I do not mean get bridged in some like, eh, let’s just not talk about politics way because that’s the bad way.
Wright Thompson: Yes, yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean like actually find some place of common decency, democratic pluralism, mutual respect, like some basic down home conventional values that I think in the best traditions we can define expansively. And it just feels like that’s a difficult project right now.
Wright Thompson: Well, I just read this book by Julian Jackson about Vichy France. And the degree to which Maureen Lappin (ph) is connected to her father, is connected to Marshal Petain, is connected to the popular front governments of the 30s and the sort of socialist French governments is connected to the Paris Commune of 1871, is connected to Napoleon, is connected to the French Revolution, is connected to Marie. Antoinette is fucking bananas. And they are not close to having dealt with the French Revolution.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Wright Thompson: And like, you just realize that this is not an American problem.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Wright Thompson: This is a human problem.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Wright Thompson: And we like to think we are modern, but we are still down in the mud fighting over really old stuff and it’s really old. And depending on what day, sometimes I think we are totally screwed and sometimes I think that, I don’t know, maybe like the thing you just said. I mean maybe there is a way to bridge a divide. I think the first thing is admitting that this is going on and I do not think we are there even there yet.
Chris Hayes: You have kids, right?
Wright Thompson: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Do you see yourself staying in Mississippi your whole life?
Wright Thompson: That’s a great question. I talked about this at lunch yesterday with a table full of Mississippian expats. I cannot imagine not for a variety of reasons. One, we still have that farm, even though it does not make any money. But also like, you know, I take care of my mother. So, they are like fundamental things where I can’t move, but I can work anywhere, you know.
My 6-year-old asked the other day if she could move to New York City. I feel like I am giving these girls an inheritance that they did not ask for and will have to deal with. I mean that inheritance is why this book exists. And so part of me feels guilty for not just getting them out of it from the beginning and that they will have to reckon with this as I did, and that’s just part of it.
And I think so many of the things you talked about, I mean so much of our politics is around giving people an excuse to not have to reckon because it’s hard. And so like on some levels, that’s it. It is just to keep people from having to do that work. And so, I do feel a little guilty. And then I fantasize about like moving to Key West and eating at Mangia Mangia every day.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Wright Thompson: Look, no one has fake-bought more houses on Zillow than me. But I fantasize about it all the time. I mean I have a novel that I am messing with in which it’s 80, 90 years from now and there is a really old man and there’s clearly been a civil war that exists in a fog in some sort of like W. G. Sebald way, but where it’s somebody living in France and exiled from Mississippi. Like I don’t think it’s an accident like the fantasy world that I would create is one of escape, exile, homesickness and melancholy.
Chris Hayes: It is true though that, I think, giving your kids, you know, come from the Bronx and I am a New Yorker and I think that identity is pretty important to me. And I love New York —
Wright Thompson: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — in a deep way, in a very full body, tactile connected to the place way. I love New York. It is a messed up place in a million way is, and I am always aware of that.
Wright Thompson: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I am very lucky because I live a life in New York that’s so much easier than 99 percent of the lives that lived here.
Wright Thompson: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It is a brutal place to live in a hundred different ways. But I also feel like one thing I am giving my kids, they are not getting, you know, I was raised Catholic. I had to go to mass every Sunday. I went to CCD, I got confirmed. I know my Old Testament in my New Testament. They are not getting any of that, they are not getting a religious tradition. They are not getting much of a connection to the ancients in any way, you know, but they are from a place and they know that.
Wright Thompson: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And they know how that important that place is to me —
Wright Thompson: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — and what it means to be from a place. And I think that is pretty important thing for a kid to have in a country that often has a lot of places that are kind of nowheresville-ish, you know.
Wright Thompson: Well, yes, there no difference between suburban Charlotte and suburban Kansas City, not really.
Chris Hayes: Increasingly that’s the case. I mean to my point before.
Wright Thompson: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I think 40, 50, 60 years ago, there was and increasingly it’s not the case.
Wright Thompson: Well, it is also the reason that as people lose their own sense of tribal connection to a place, they are easy prey —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Wright Thompson: — for people selling tribes.
Chris Hayes: Yes. That is right.
Wright Thompson: Like there’s a message that lands in people’s ears —
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
Wright Thompson: — that would not have, you know and you see it.
Chris Hayes: If you’re actually connected, yes.
Wright Thompson: If you are actually connected to a place and you go to a church where, like you know what I mean? Like if you are from a real place that is its own ecosystem, I think people are super hungry for a sense of tribal belonging. I don’t think it’s an accident that as religion has declined in America, extremism has risen.
And it is not because God isn’t in people’s lives, but it is because people are desperate for some sort of tribal connection in a world in which, you know, I think about this all the time. Think about how dehumanizing it is to work in a store that has the tap or the keypad. You know, how many times I go in, I just did it at a store in New York, like you don’t make eye contact with people. Like I think these things are all related.
Chris Hayes: It is true. I know, yes.
Wright Thompson: You know, that human beings have never been more disconnected from each other, and it’s not an accident they have never been more hunger for someone selling a travel belonging.
Chris Hayes: Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN. He is the author of numerous books, the latest, the one we’re discussing today and the one I really recommend along with his others but you should definitely check out this book. It’s called “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.” Wright, that was great. Thanks so much.
Wright Thompson: I really appreciate it.
Chris Hayes: Once again. Great. Thanks to Wright Thompson. I really enjoyed both the book and the conversation. I learned a lot. I really hope you did too. We would love to hear what you thought. E-mail us said withpod@ gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the #WITHpod. You could follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You could follow me on Threads, Bluesky and the app formerly known as Twitter with the handle @chrislhayes. Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Fernando Arruda and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.