Editor’s Note: This article contains opinions of the author that may not reflect the opinions of The E-T.
Sunflower County.
There is a lot of history in the soil here, some known and some stories still mysterious.
There’s the Blues, Civil Rights, politics and much more.
But just outside Drew, in an aging barn hidden by time and perhaps some indifference, lies one of the most haunting remnants of America’s darkest struggles.
It was here, deep in the Delta’s cotton country that 14-year-old Emmett Till was tortured and beaten before his body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River in August 1955.
For decades, the barn has been standing as a silent witness to history, its walls absorbing the horror of that night.
Yet, in Sunflower County, as in much of Mississippi, there’s a long tradition of forgetting.
Some residents know the stories but won’t speak about them aloud.
Others have inherited the silence, either out of fear or because time has made the memory easier to ignore.
The story is perhaps just now being told to the world in its entirety, partly due to Wright Thompson’s new book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.
Emmett Till wasn’t from Mississippi.
He was a city kid from Chicago, a world away from the rigid racial lines of the Jim Crowe South. His journey to Money, Mississippi was meant to be a summer visit with family, but in the segregated Delta, even an alleged wolf whistle at a white woman, the late Carolyn Bryant, could be a death sentence.
In the early hours of August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, armed and unafraid of consequence, kidnapped Till from his great-uncle’s home in Leflore County. They drove him across county lines, bringing him to the barn near Drew, a structure that for nearly 70 years has stood as a crime scene without justice.
Inside those walls, Till was beaten so severely that he was nearly unrecognizable.
The men wanted to teach him a lesson, but their cruelty knew no bounds.
After the torture, they drove him to the Tallahatchie River, where they shot him, tied a cotton-gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, and threw his body into the water.
Sunflower County, where the barn still stands, carries this history in its soil, yet many here still hesitate to claim it. Indianola, where I live, is a town that prides itself on its cultural significance, it’s the home of the B.B. King Museum and a symbol of the Delta blues.
But it’s also a place that, like much of Mississippi, has wrestled with the weight of its past.
People in Drew, Indianola and the surrounding areas don’t often speak about the barn.
It’s not a place that has a historic marker, but it has started to host groups of tourists from all over the world.
When there aren’t tour buses pulling up to the site, it sits there, in the background of history, a building linked to an unspeakable crime, yet at the time of the crime was left out of the narrative.
How does a community live alongside such a place without acknowledging it?
How many people have driven past the barn without knowing its significance, and how many know but refuse to speak?
Thompson’s book digs into this silence, uncovering the forces that allowed Till’s murderers to walk free.
But for those of us who live here, the barn isn’t just a piece of history, it’s a reminder that the past isn’t as distant as we’d like to believe.
The fight to preserve Till’s memory has taken place in courtrooms, in documentaries and in the fight by many in Till’s family and circle to indict those involved, including the late Carolyn Bryant.
Yet, here in Sunflower County, the barn remains, its story unfinished, its legacy unrecognized.
Most accounts of Emmett Till’s murder focus on his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who made the courageous decision to hold an open-casket funeral, forcing the world to see what had been done to her son.
Others examine the trial, the acquittal, and later, the confessions.
But what about the places that still exist, what about the physical reminders of what happened?
The barn is more than a building. It is proof. It is evidence. It is a piece of Sunflower County, a part of our landscape, a chapter of history that cannot be erased no matter how many people try to look away.
Maybe it’s time that Sunflower County stops looking away and demands that the barn be recognized for its historical significance.
