From THE BARN by Wright Thompson, to be published on Sept. 24, 2024 by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Wright Thompson.
Most everyone is taught that Emmett Till whistled at a white woman at a rural grocery store on an August Wednesday in 1955. The following Saturday night, that woman’s husband and brothers kidnapped, tortured and killed the 14-year-old boy in a barn in the Mississippi Delta. It’s an often told story, by history teachers and terrified parents, familiar for the tension between the gruesome details, like how his body was dragged down into the Tallahatchie River by the weight of a gin fan wrapped around his neck with barbed wire, and how Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral, so the whole world could see what Mississippi did to her son.
What almost nobody knows, including me when I started reporting The Barn , my new book on the untold history of this famous murder, is that he allegedly whistled the day after a long gubernatorial election dominated by intense racial rhetoric. Mississippi during the election of 1955 was a place trapped in a cycle of hysteria, conspiracy and rage. “A Nazi rally,” is how former Gov. William Winter once described to me the state’s mood during the civil rights era.