After an Atlantic story about the lynching of Emmett Till, the barn where he was murdered will be converted into a memorial.
From the graveled bend on Drew Ruleville Road, the barn is barely visible. A knot of trees obscures its weathered cypress panels; a driver could easily miss the structure from across the bayou. There is no indication that this is the place where Emmett Till was beaten and tortured.
That is about to change. In the September 2021 issue of The Atlantic, Wright Thompson reflected on the barn’s history and what its erasure says about how Mississippi remembers the lynching of Emmett Till. His story caught the attention of the television producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes, who today announced a donation to the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, which will buy the barn and convert it into a permanent memorial.
“The murder of Emmett Till was the real fire that lit the civil-rights movement,” Rhimes told Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts this morning. Thompson’s article, she said, “changed the course of how I was thinking about charitable giving; it changed the course of how I was thinking about even preserving history.”
From the September 2021 issue: Wright Thompson on what we still don’t know about Emmett Till’s murder
Till was 14 when he was abducted by two white men, Roy Bryant and his half brother J. W. Milam, and brought to the barn, rented at the time by Leslie Milam, another of Bryant’s half brothers. There, he was savagely beaten; most historians believe that at least seven people were present. Investigators believe that he was then shot in the head, and the men dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River.
Till’s murder brought national attention to the resurgence of lynching in the South, but in Sumner, Mississippi, an all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam, the only two men charged with Till’s murder. Protected by the Fifth Amendment’s double-jeopardy clause, they later confessed to the crime in a magazine profile that neglected to mention Leslie Milam or his barn. The site faded from public memory.
After Till’s murder, the owner of the property sold the land and turned out Leslie Milam. A series of families cycled through it, either not knowing or not paying attention to what had occurred there. The property was purchased in the 1990s by Jeff Andrews, a dentist. When Thompson first visited, in 2020, Andrews was using the barn to store Christmas decorations, a lawnmower, and a boat motor.
Rhimes’s donation may at last guarantee that the barn receives the attention it deserves.
“I’m just overwhelmed,” Reverend Willie Williams, the chair of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center’s board of directors, told me. Williams was born in 1955, the same year Till was murdered; he grew up not far from where Till was kidnapped. “I think it’s going to really enhance this journey that we are on, to allow people to learn and allow people to heal, and hopefully we’ll be a better community and a better nation.”
Read: Vann R. Newkirk II on Emmett Till and the ghosts of the Mississippi Delta
In July, the Biden administration declared a new Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument comprising three places: the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, the site of Emmett’s open-casket funeral; Graball Landing on the Tallahatchie River, where many believe his body was recovered; and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Bryant and Milam were tried and acquitted of his murder. Past markers meant to commemorate places associated with Till’s lynching have been stolen, shot up, and destroyed. The new national monument is managed by the National Park Service.
Gloria Dickerson, a Sunflower County supervisor and local community organizer, told me she hopes that a memorial at the barn will help revitalize the surrounding area. Dickerson is the daughter of sharecroppers, and in 1965, she and her siblings were the first students to integrate the public schools of Drew, Mississippi. When she moved back to the community after retiring, in 2009, more than half of all children lived below the poverty line. Dickerson thinks that a memorial will bring not only visitors and jobs to Drew but also, most important, she said, pride. Growing up, her mother, active in the struggle for civil rights, made sure she knew Emmett Till’s story. “The Mississippi Delta is really the ground zero for the civil-rights movement,” Dickerson said. “In order for us to move along and to heal and to do good, we need to know where we come from.”
“My hope is that this story never gets lost,” Rhimes said. “History is always told by the victors. I think it’s important that the Till family is the victor in this story.”
A Memorial at the Barn
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18.12.2023
After an Atlantic story about the lynching of Emmett Till, the barn where he was murdered will be converted into a memorial.
From the graveled bend on Drew Ruleville Road, the barn is barely visible. A knot of trees obscures its weathered cypress panels; a driver could easily miss the structure from across the bayou. There is no indication that this is the place where Emmett Till was beaten and tortured.
That is about to change. In the September 2021 issue of The Atlantic, Wright Thompson reflected on the barn’s history and what its erasure says about how Mississippi remembers the lynching of Emmett Till. His story caught the attention of the television producer and screenwriter Shonda Rhimes, who today announced a donation to the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, which will buy the barn and convert it into a permanent memorial.
“The murder of Emmett Till was the real fire that lit the civil-rights movement,” Rhimes told Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts this morning. Thompson’s article, she said, “changed the course of how I was thinking about charitable giving; it changed the course of how I was thinking about even preserving........
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