The tour bus turns left onto the narrow county road, leaving the small town of Drew in the dust.
After a couple of miles of driving, the bus stops. To the left, freshly plowed fields, still wet from a mid-week rain.
To the right, a long driveway, leading to a beautiful, two-story white home.
Behind this beautiful home, however, stands one of Sunflower County’s darkest secrets.
At least until a few years ago it was a secret.
Now, hundreds of tourists come every year to visit the barn where 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally beaten and likely murdered by J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant during the late summer of 1955.
The two men sold their confession to Look! Magazine months after being acquitted for Till’s kidnapping and murder.
Likely strategic, Milam and Bryant left the barn outside of Drew largely out of the story.
And so the barn stood for decades, leaving only the walls to carry the secrets of that hot August night.
“I put the barn in the same category as the Lorraine Motel in Memphis,” Donald Dickerson said standing outside the structure during the Delta Civil Rights Driving Tour last Saturday, referencing the place where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
That’s not hyperbole or an overinflated view of the barn’s significance by a local.
What happened in that wooden shed proved to be the catalyst for the start of the civil rights movement.
Just in the last four years, a hit television series - Women of the Movement - and a movie - Till - have been produced about the murder.
And as more people around the world have become educated about the northern Sunflower County town’s part in the story, they have started to drive the extra miles out of the way to visit and pay homage.
Some tours have added the barn as a stop along historic sites.
Just recently, the Sunflower County Board of Supervisors authorized the construction of a turnaround just past the driveway, specifically for tour buses.
Milam and Bryant wanted the world to look every place but that barn.
Nearly 70 years later, however, the opposite is happening.
And yet, there seems to be no real plan to commemorate this historic site with a marker.
The Delta, which already boasts multiple Till markers, namely in Money and in Tallahatchie County, seems obsessed with documenting its history, good and bad, by way of historical markers.
But almost four years after this paper called for a marker at the barn, and after years of national and international news articles, and after multiple Hollywood productions, there still seems to be hesitation when it comes to recognizing the historical significance of the barn.
Milam and Bryant were not Sunflower County folks, at least not at the time.
They dragged Drew and the county into this story when they brought Till here.
No matter how unfair that might seem, the barn and all the baggage that comes with it is ours.
So, what do we do with it?
Do we pretend it doesn’t exist?
Those days are clearly over. The world knows it’s there, and the world is coming to see it.
It’s time to transform this dark secret into a positive message for good.
It’s time to let the world know exactly what Till’s mother, Mamie Mobley wanted the world to know.
Milam and Bryant did not win in the end.
Sure, they beat an easily beatable 1950s Mississippi court system, but they didn’t defeat the spirit of a people who just a decade later saw passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.
They murdered a defenseless child, but they ignited a movement that is still alive in many today.
The barn is a symbol for that spirit.
Think of all things in seven decades that could have brought that structure to the ground.
And yet, it still stands, and it deserves a marker to celebrate that.
