Wright Thompson

Haunting . . . The Barn is part investigative journalism, part catharsis. Thompson travels back and forth through space and time, describing a brutal murder on one page, riffing about the blues on another. The story meanders like the myriad tributaries of the Mississippi. The writing is often breathtaking, brutality amplified through perfectly crafted prose.

Extraordinary . . . Not only an intimate history of the tragedy, but also a deep meditation on Mississippi and America . . . While sifting through the dirt that buried the facts about Till’s death, Thompson credits the work of the historians, journalists and filmmakers who have sought to tell the true tale. But he crafts a wider, deeper narrative. The Barn is serious history and skillful journalism, but with the nuance and wallop of a finely wrought novel . . . Describes not just the poison of silence and lies, but also the dignity of courage and truth.

With a passion for truth and justice, and a fierce determination to dig for the secrets, Wright Thompson has produced an incredible history of a crime that changed America.

It literally changed my outlook on the world . . . incredible.

Powerfully pieces together the true story of a horrific murder in the Mississippi Delta in 1955.

Powerful and unflinching . . . What’s unforgettable by the end of Thompson’s book is just how thoroughly this country was built on a belief that some people were worthless and expendable because of the color of their skin . . . Books like The Barn offer some hope that America can heal its oldest and deepest wound.

The most brutal, layered and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read . . . Every generation you get a few writers with the engine of a 747 and the skill of a wizard. We see it in Ward, Wright, Faulkner and Trethewey. And that finely crafted motor is on full display in this work by Wright Thompson. The Barn is the new standard in research and book-making.

Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

In this important, diligently researched, and beautifully rendered story, Wright Thompson takes up one of the most consequential and tragic events of the twentieth century, the murder of Emmett Till, in the place where it happened. The land, the people, and circumstance are vivid on every page. With integrity, and soul, Thompson unearths the terrible how and why, carrying us back and forth through time, deep in Mississippi - baring, sweat, soil, and heart all the way through. Most of all, Thompson teaches us that history is the most important ghost story there is to tell, and that we - the haunted - must be healed.

Imani Perry,  Professor in African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Terrifying and humbling, The Barn is a chilling examination of the American strain of a nasty human disorder: the slow immolation that some communities initiate when they choose enabling mythologies, deceit, silence, injustice, and willed ignorance as their moral orders.

A gut-punch of a book . . . Foregoing the harrowing photos that emphasize Till’s martyrdom, Thompson dives instead into family trees, court transcripts, witness memoirs and more to unearth the enormous human tragedy we forget at our peril.

Crucial facts about this historic injustice are still coming to light, many of which are gathered in Wright Thompson’s gripping, thoroughly researched account of the night Till was murdered - in a barn just over 20 miles from Thompson’s family farm - and the cover up that followed (and continues to this day).

This book is not only a retelling of the crime - a story that Till’s family, among others, has already published - but also a rich and wandering history of the township in which Till died: the few square miles of plantations that helped birth both the blues and the Ku Klux Klan. Thompson writes movingly of more than one “enormous web of interconnected people” in the Delta, and of the ongoing fight to commemorate its lynchings. He brings a local’s intensity to the project: the book is as much about his neighbors, and even his kin, as it is about his country.

This book combines serious journalism and reporting alongside nuanced writing to look in depth at the brutal murder of Emmett Till. The book dives into the how and the why, focusing on the state of Mississippi itself and the role of property, money, power, and white supremacy.

Thompson writes with a tone of relentless urgency at once tempered by a deep reflection on what becomes, ultimately, a seemingly unavoidable trajectory, a cataclysmic inevitability—the consequences of material greed and cruel disregard . . . He writes, too, with a true storyteller’s gift for language and image, and the ability to make grand connections across time and space, to see all the forces culminating in one terrible moment, all the lives destroyed or forever marked by what happened that night.

Natasha Trethewey, former Poet Laureate of the United States and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

A profoundly affecting, brilliantly narrated story of both an infamous murder and its unexpected consequences.

You’ll almost be able to feel the gumbo mud . . . Thompson uses a narrow barn as a pivot point to reach back in history, to Reconstruction and slavery, Jim Crow and differences in racism in the North and South, Delta culture, and the biography of a boy, in a story that’s both personal and local, and that’ll keep you glued to your seat . . . The Barn is a tale that’s hard to read, but also one you can’t look away from.

The Barn is the perfect combination of suspense, history, and truth. Within these pages, readers will journey alongside Thompson as he unearths the chilling details of the murder of Emmett Till. Through meticulous research and a gripping narrative, Thompson reckons with the complexities surrounding this case and the systemic corruption that relentlessly works to bury the truth.

In this arresting, insightful book, Wright Thompson takes a deep dive into the historical record to guide us on a compelling, thousand-year international journey of power, greed, corruption and injustice, leading inevitably to the lynching of Emmett Till.

Christopher Benson, Associate Professor, Medill School of Journalism; co-author OF A FEW DAYS FULL OF TROUBLE: REVELATIONS ON THE JOURNEY TO JUSTICE FOR MY COUSIN AND BEST FRIEND, EMMETT TILL

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 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 . . . 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.

This wild, deranged country I live in only made partial sense to me until I read Wright Thompson's new book, The Barn . . . Till's murder is the sin America can't get past, and the honest conversation we can't have.

When an all-white jury found Emmett Till's killers not guilty of murder, the story became an international scandal, and in this riveting investigation Wright Thompson uses it to frame a devastating history of racism in the American South.

Seven decades on, Wright Thompson casts new light on the brutal night that sparked the civil rights movement . . . The original casket in which young Till was buried is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African American History and Culture. Lines are long. Mainly because people stay a moment to pay tribute but also because many are not familiar with what happened. Perhaps The Barn will bring the nation back to the understanding of the words of the founding director of the museum, Lonnie Bunch III. This is not just African-American history, this is “American History”.

Thompson’s expertly integrated narrative takes in both the sweeping saga of land and race in Mississippi and individual stories . . . The Barn is a book about memory, its fragility and its resilience, and its intimate but often invisible connection to the ground we stand on.

Exhaustively researched, upsetting, moving and necessary . . . A timely, invaluable look at a campaign of silence that is as dangerous as what it tries to hide.

The Murder of Emmett Till and the Cradle of American Racism

Emmett Till’s murder is one of the most infamous in American history; a moment that, more than any other, awakened the world to the racism of the Deep South. Yet despite growing up just a few miles from where it happened, Wright Thompson knew nothing of it until he left Mississippi. This is no accident: the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing. 
 
Over the course of five years’ research, Thompson has learnt that almost every part of the standard account of Till’s killing is wrong. In August 1955, after the two men charged with the murder were acquitted by an all-white jury, they gave a false confession to a journalist: one that was misleading about where the murder took place and who was involved. We now know that at least eight people were present, and many more complicit. And we now know precisely where it took place: inside a barn on a 36-square-mile grid called Township 22 North, Range 4 West. 
 
This book tells the story of that barn. It is the story of what really happened on the night of August 28, 1955, and of the individuals who have spent decades bringing the truth to light. And it is the story of the centuries-old forces that made that night inevitable: forces that, over the course of 200 years, transformed Township 22 North, Range 4 West from Choctaw land, to a slave plantation, to a sharecropper’s farm, to the site of the most significant murder in US history. 
 
The result is a revelatory work of investigative reportage and a panoramic new history of white supremacy in America. It maps the road that the US – and the world – must travel to heal its oldest, deepest wound.

Wright Thompson

Praise for The Barn

Haunting . . . The Barn is part investigative journalism, part catharsis. Thompson travels back and forth through space and time, describing a brutal murder on one page, riffing about the blues on another. Th ...

Extraordinary . . . Not only an intimate history of the tragedy, but also a deep meditation on Mississippi and America . . . While sifting through the dirt that buried the facts about Till’s death, Thompson credits ...

With a passion for truth and justice, and a fierce determination to dig for the secrets, Wright Thompson has produced an incredible history of a crime that changed America.

Haunting . . . The Barn is part investigative journalism, part catharsis. Thompson travels back and forth through space and time, describing a brutal murder on one page, riffing about the blues on another. Th ...

Extraordinary . . . Not only an intimate history of the tragedy, but also a deep meditation on Mississippi and America . . . While sifting through the dirt that buried the facts about Till’s death, Thompson credits ...

With a passion for truth and justice, and a fierce determination to dig for the secrets, Wright Thompson has produced an incredible history of a crime that changed America.

Haunting . . . The Barn is part investigative journalism, part catharsis. Thompson travels back and forth through space and time, describing a brutal murder on one page, riffing about the blues on another. Th ...

Extraordinary . . . Not only an intimate history of the tragedy, but also a deep meditation on Mississippi and America . . . While sifting through the dirt that buried the facts about Till’s death, Thompson credits ...

With a passion for truth and justice, and a fierce determination to dig for the secrets, Wright Thompson has produced an incredible history of a crime that changed America.

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