The Barn

Reviews

“To say Wright Thompson’s latest book is about Emmett Till’s murder would be to undersell its scope and the author’s ambition . . . The Barn is a sensitive, deeply reported book that will make you reconsider everything you thought you knew about Till’s lynching and its place in American history.” —TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of the Year

“[Thompson’s] extraordinary new book The Barn is not only an intimate history of the tragedy, but also a deep meditation on Mississippi and America . . . While sifting through the dirt that buried the facts about Till’s death, Thompson credits the work of the historians, journalists and filmmakers who have sought to tell the true tale. But he crafts a wider, deeper narrative. The Barn is serious history and skillful journalism, but with the nuance and wallop of a finely wrought novel . . . The Barn describes not just the poison of silence and lies, but also the dignity of courage and truth.” —The Washington Post
 
“Terrifying and humbling, The Barn is a chilling examination of the American strain of a nasty human disorder: the slow immolation that some communities initiate when they choose enabling mythologies, deceit, silence, injustice, and willed ignorance as their moral orders.” —Boston Globe

“Thompson . . . has written a gut-punch of a book about the murder of Emmett Till and the place where it happened. Foregoing the harrowing photos that emphasize Till’s martyrdom, Thompson dives instead into family trees, court transcripts, witness memoirs and more to unearth the enormous human tragedy we forget at our peril: 'Hate grows stronger and resistant,' he reminds us, ‘when it’s pushed underground.’” —Los Angeles Times

“You’ll almost be able to feel the gumbo mud . . . Thompson uses a narrow barn as a pivot point to reach back in history, to Reconstruction and slavery, Jim Crow and differences in racism in the North and South, Delta culture, and the biography of a boy, in a story that’s both personal and local, and that’ll keep you glued to your seat . . . The Barn is a tale that’s hard to read, but also one you can’t look away from.” —Philadelphia Tribune

“Thompson travels back to his native Mississippi . . . and talks to scores of people, building on the reporting of others to tell Till’s story, and using the barn as a jumping off point to explore the racist history of the Mississippi Delta . . . It’s powerful and unflinching writing . . . What’s unforgettable by the end of Thompson’s book… is just how thoroughly this country was built on a belief that some people were worthless and expendable because of the color of their skin . . . It’s the work of activists like Dickerson and books like The Barn that offer some hope that America can heal its oldest and deepest wound.” —Associated Press

“Part memoir, part reportage, Thompson’s book is not only an elegiac tribute to a child whose life was cut short too soon, but also a searing indictment of the system that enabled the lynching and the subsequent cover-up.” —Smithsonian Magazine

“[Thompson’s] personal investment, professionalism, and integrity pay out. This is most evident in the trust he earns from eyewitnesses, including Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., Till’s closest friend in Chicago . . . Digging deep into the individual-meets-local-meets-global Mississippi Delta history, The Barn helps reckon with traumatic memory writ large.” —Chapter 16

“This book combines serious journalism and reporting alongside nuanced writing to look in depth at the brutal murder of Emmett Till. The book dives into the how and the why, focusing on the state of Mississippi itself and the role of property, money, power, and white supremacy.” —BuzzFeed
 
“Pappyland, showed the author’s talent for threading culture, history and industry together with vividly drawn portraits of a family. His new history, The Barn, takes a similar tack as Thompson investigates a crime we may think we understand: the murder of Emmett Till. Thompson grew up just miles away from where the Black child was murdered in the Mississippi Delta, and his inquiry digs up truths long concealed and cover-ups still ongoing.” —Bookpage
 
“The Barn is the perfect combination of suspense, history, and truth. Within these pages, readers will journey alongside Thompson as he unearths the chilling details of the murder of Emmett Till. Through meticulous research and a gripping narrative, Thompson reckons with the complexities surrounding this case and the systemic corruption that relentlessly works to bury the truth.” –SheReads

“A profoundly affecting, brilliantly narrated story of both an infamous murder and its unexpected consequences.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“Carefully weighing each word as though it’s being set on the scales of justice, Thompson presents a deeply felt and vitally written history of conscience with infinite consequence.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Crucial facts about this historic injustice are still coming to light, many of which are gathered in Wright Thompson’s gripping, thoroughly researched account of the night Till was murdered—in a barn just over 20 miles from Thompson’s family farm—and the cover up that followed (and continues to this day). An important addition to the historical record.” —LitHub

“The Barn is the most brutal, layered and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read. In Mississippi, we talk about athletes who bust their ass, skills be damned. Well, every generation you get a few writers with the engine of a 747 and the skill of a wizard. We see it in Ward, Wright, Faulkner and Trethewey. And that finely crafted motor is on full display in this work by Wright Thompson. The Barn is the new standard in research and book-making. There is one Wright Thompson. And we are so lucky he loves Mississippi. Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than this. Mississippi, goddamn.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy: An American Memoir

“In this important, diligently researched, and beautifully rendered story, Wright Thompson takes up one of the most consequential and tragic events of the twentieth century, the murder of Emmett Till, in the place where it happened. The land, the people, and circumstance are vivid on every page. With integrity, and soul, Thompson unearths the terrible how and why, carrying us back and forth through time, deep in Mississippi—baring sweat, soil, and heart all the way through. Most of all, Thompson teaches us that history is the most important ghost story there is to tell, and that we—the haunted—must be healed.” —Imani Perry

“The secrets of what happened in the barn in 1955 when a boy named Emmett Till was murdered have been buried for decades. The killers were never brought to justice and their allies covered up for them. With a passion for truth and justice, and a fierce determination to dig for the secrets, Wright Thompson has produced an incredible history of a crime that changed America.” —John Grisham

“In this arresting, insightful book, Wright Thompson takes a deep dive into the historical record to guide us on a compelling, thousand-year international journey of power, greed, corruption and injustice, leading inevitably to the lynching of Emmett Till.” —Christopher Benson, Associate Professor, Medill School of Journalism; co-author with Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice for My Cousin and Best Friend, Emmett Till

“Geography, wrote Ralph Ellison, is fate—an axiom painstakingly proven in the compelling architecture of Wright Thompson’s The Barn. Though grounded in a small radius within the landscape of Mississippi, this capacious examination of a terrible history is both expansive and granular, national and personal. Thompson writes with a tone of relentless urgency at once tempered by a deep reflection on what becomes, ultimately, a seemingly unavoidable trajectory, a cataclysmic inevitability—the consequences of material greed and cruel disregard—into which our nation and the people in it were thrust. He writes, too, with a true storyteller’s gift for language and image, and the ability to make grand connections across time and space, to see all the forces culminating in one terrible moment, all the lives destroyed or forever marked by what happened that night. Follow them though time, Thompson writes—and we do—into a world not only harrowing but also, we come to see, redeemable when the act of remembering, of looking unflinchingly at the troubled fabric of our nation is itself a kind of accountability, and redemption.” —Natasha Trethewey Expand reviews