Book review: Killing of a black boy whitewashed

'The Barn' is a glimpse of a nation’s troubled past that offers insight in to the tortured present, and makes you worry about the bleak future

Wright Thompson has written something remarkable, a triumph of forensic research that has never been more needed. Picture: Evan France

• The Barn: The Murder of Emmett Till and the Cradle of American Racism
• Wright Thompson 
• Hutchinson Heinemann,  €36.25

On August 28, 1955, Emmet Till — a 14-year-old African-American boy down from Chicago to visit his relatives in Mississipi before school restarted — was abducted, tortured, and beaten almost beyond recognition in a barn in Mississippi. 

His kidnappers tied a gin fan around his neck, shot him in the head, and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. 

Till had been targetted because of an allegation that he had whistled at a white woman in a store. 

Two of the white men involved in the murder were tried and acquitted; some jurors were their friends and distant family.

In the junior-high-school textbook in the state today, Till’s death and the mockery of a trial merit just a single paragraph. 

There is no photograph of Till. Instead, he is misidentified as “a young black man”; the racist governor of the time is somehow praised; and students learn that coverage of the incident “painted a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens”. 

This kind of outlandish refusal to reckon with the uglier episodes from history is what makes Wright Thompson’s epic The Barn: The Murder of Emmett Till and the Cradle of American Racism a necessary book.

Emmett Louis Till, aged 14, with his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, at home in Chicago. File picture: Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty 

There are efforts across the US to prevent teachers from educating pupils about systemic racism, slavery, segregation, and all the other shameful chapters in the American experiment. 

Thompson has written something remarkable, a triumph of forensic research that has never been more needed. 

He skilfully threads the narrative with accounts of how Till’s surviving family and friends have worked hard to commemorate his life and his death. 

That’s not easy in a place where so many are hell bent on forgetting.

Wright Thompson, perhaps the finest American sportswriter of his generation, has a lyrical literary touch and has pieced together something special. 

It is equal parts a revision of the erroneous record, an archaeological excavation of the land, a salutary lesson about economic forces, and a psychological exploration of the heavy price paid when people embrace deliberate amnesia.

Tracing from way back the winding path that took Till and the eight people involved in his savage demise to the barn that day, Thompson sifts through the origin story of the Delta itself, the commingled bloodlines, the lingering stain of slavery, and the outsized role of ‘king cotton’ in the boom-and-bust cycles. 

The journey to that awful place just happens to be soundtracked by the birth of the blues in the same corner of the world.

There is so much involved that perhaps only a local could weave this yarn in a way that simultaneously grips, educates, and moves the reader on this impressive scale. 

Thompson was born, and still lives, just miles from the barn.

Writing something so powerful, raking over old bones, and exposing its sordid underbelly truly requires guts. 

He’s up to the task, sparing nobody, not even his own kin. 

In the process, he has produced a work of truth and reconciliation that should be mandatory reading in schools, so the youth might better appreciate where they came from.

If you seek to understand the original sins continuing to blight Trump country today, or if you want to realise how much damage the war on history is doing to its collective psyche, this is a truly great book. 

It is a glimpse of a nation’s troubled past that offers insight in to the tortured present, and makes you worry about the bleak future.