Gloria Dickerson had known since her early youth about the barn just outside of Drew where Emmett Till was taken and likely murdered in the late summer of 1955. It was an open secret, so to speak, in the small Sunflower County community. Others, even some African Americans from Drew, did not learn about the wood building’s dark history until years later. Journalist and author Wright Thompson has detailed in a new book called The Barn the secrets surrounding the Drew property and how its role in the Till case had been overlooked for many decades. Dickerson said that she played a significant role in the book, providing Thompson with her own family’s history and how she came to know about the barn. She appeared with Thompson last month during an event in Oxford. Dickerson and Thompson appeared last Sunday on a CBS Sunday Morning segment discussing the barn’s past and its future. “(Wright) wanted the book not just to be about the murder and the secrets and keeping it hidden, but he wanted to also talk about how do we change this?” Dickerson told The Enterprise-Tocsin in an interview this week. “How do we make sure that this story is not forgotten and that the story is not going to be swept under the rug anymore and that we’re going to publicize it and put it out there for history’s sake.” The barn is indeed receiving national press, but Dickerson said that her mission, especially as director of the Emmett Till Academy, is to make sure that the youth and others in Sunflower County are aware of the history and that it is not forgotten. “It’s important that the young generation knows their history,” Dickerson said. Dickerson said that she interviewed on camera with CBS investigative reporter Jim Axelrod for about an hour and a half for the segment, which was eventually edited down to about 15 minutes. The CBS crew spent about an hour, she said, with her roughly 30 students at the academy. Most of that, and her one-on-one, did not make it past the cutting room floor, Dickerson said, but she said that the overall experience with the national news crew was good. The national spotlight is good, and so is local awareness, Dickerson said. Perhaps that’s the most important telling of the history of the region. “I’m going to make sure that the people that I come into contact with, that’s the people here in Sunflower County, know their history and that it’s not swept under the rug,” she said. The CBS segment can be viewed on CBS News’s website.
