Lost in the Stacks: The Barn

Perhaps mockingbirds were singing on that sleepy, Sunday morning but witnesses only remembered hearing the cries of a terrified child. “Mama, save me!” begged 14-year-old Bobo as a small group of men, safe in the privacy of a Mississippi barn, tortured and eventually killed Emmett Till in revenge for his mischievous whistle at a white woman.  

The barn still stands. Whispered about by Blacks and deliberately forgotten by whites, the place where Emmett Till was lynched on Aug 28, 1955, was almost erased from the historical record. The killing of Emmett Till sparked the Civil Rights movement, yet for years the barn was just that – a place to store farm equipment, even Christmas decorations. The very dirt that absorbed Emmett’s blood covered by the mundane trappings of everyday life. 

In The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, Wright Thompson masterfully tells the story not just of the barn and Emmett Till’s murder, but of the history of this small section of land in the Mississippi Delta. A piece of land that contained both the footsteps of the founder of the Ku Klux Klan and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. A land of pecan groves and bayous, of cotton and soybeans, of racism and lynching.  

You will learn compelling new information about the murder of Emmett Till, his family and the courageous men and women who continue to bear witness to the actual fun-loving child who died far too soon.