Wright Thompson, Author: I feel like all the answers to the questions we don't want to ask, not just about our country, but about the sort of, "What lives in the hearts of all men?"

lives inside the darkness of that barn.

Marcia Franklin, Host: Coming up…I talk with author Wright Thompson about his book, "The Barn."

That's next on "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference."

Stay tuned.

(Music) Major funding is provided by the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Franklin: Hello and welcome to "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference."

I'm Marcia Franklin.

My guest today initially resisted writing the book that we'll be discussing.

But ultimately, as you will hear, Wright Thompson felt compelled to keep going.

The result was "The Barn," an investigation into the 1955 torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi.

The murder and subsequent trial shook America and propelled the civil rights movement in our country to a new level.

The crime took place just 23 miles from where Thompson had grown up.

And because of his familiarity with the area, his book takes a different approach than other books, in that he takes a deep dive into the history of the barn where till was tortured and may have died.

That structure – and the land around it – become characters themselves.

Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN.com, and the author of two other books: "The Cost of These Dreams," and "Pappyland."

I spoke with him at the 2025 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.

We talked about why he feels this story is so important to keep in our nation's memory, and how writing the book affected him.

Marcia Franklin, Host: Well, welcome to Idaho.

I understand it's your first time here.

Wright Thompson, Author, "The Barn": It is.

I think like most people we're trying to figure out ways to never leave.

So, I don't know what the squatter laws are here, but they might have to pry me out of this room.

It's really beautiful.

Franklin: Well, on a much more serious note, the story that's in the barn is so difficult, so deep, so heavy, so important, um, and you spent so much time with it, so you got even more of the emotional effect of it.

Why did you want to spend so much time of your life with this very, very difficult story?

Thompson: Uh, I, I didn't.

And tried over and over to talk myself out of it, to not do it.

I mean, it didn't start as a book or even a magazine story.

Uh, you know, during the pandemic, I worked for ESPN, and so all of my work is out of town and we were all grounded.

I couldn't go anywhere.

And it was awesome for three weeks, and you know, cooked all of the backstraps, deer backstraps out of the freezer.

I cooked all of the speckled trout and redfish that we'd caught.

And then I was like, "I'm starting to go crazy."

And uh, somebody called me and asked me if I'd ever heard of the barn.

And so I just started driving over to the Delta during the day and went to find it and went to go talk to people and then got obsessed.

And then couldn't come up with a good reason to not do it.

And believe me, I tried.

Franklin: Because?

Thompson: Well, I mean, one, it just, you know, I didn't want to know all of this.

You know, there's some real peace in ignorance.

And I just didn't want to know as much as I know about how a 14-year-old gets tortured.

And why it happens, and, uh, you know, I didn't want to know and then I couldn't stop wanting to know.

Franklin: And even though you lived and you grew up 23, I think miles from the barn?

Thompson: Yeah.

Our family farm is 23 miles from the barn.

Franklin: Even though you grew up so close to the barn, there was a lot of not knowing going on then, too.

What did you know of Emmett Till growing up?

Thompson: I didn't know a single thing.

I'd never heard the name before.

Uh, you know, there was a real omertà.

And I mean, I use that word intentionally, 'cause, you know, it was, it was, there was a real silence around it, and no one talked about it.

The erasure of this crime -- it was serious, intentional, and nearly complete.

Uh, when the FBI showed up to reopen the case in the early 2000s, they got to the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, and the files were all empty.

Uh, if you go to the Ole Miss Library, you can find the 1956 Look Magazine that has the famous confession of the killers in it.

That magazine is there, but that story is torn out.

Uh, there's a reason that the historical markers they put up keep getting shot up.

The current marker that is at the river site representing where they found the body is actually bulletproof, so you can't shoot it up anymore.

And so, you know, there was an almost total erasure.

And one of the things the book does, in addition to recounting the history and, and the marshaling of forces that intersected in August of 1955, one of the other threads is the people who walked out of that, that sort of miasma of darkness and fought to make sure that people never forgot.

I encourage people to, to read the story, because every time you tell one other person this story and you say the name "Emmett Till," you are fighting the forces of erasure which are swirling and swarming all around us.

Franklin: We should say, sitting here today, we're just a week away from what would be Emmett Till's 84th birthday.

This is not ancient history.

Thompson: Uh, the family threw a 80th birthday party in Chicago, and I was lucky to be, lucky enough to be invited.

And this really old, frail, strong woman stood up who was his aunt, and said, "I wasn't there when he died, but I was there when he was born."

And I mean, it makes the hair stand up on my arms.

You know, this is a very famous murder that happened to a country.

It happened to a race of people.

But it also was a thing that happened -- and in many ways it's still happening - to a family.

And so, you know, you asked me why I didn't want to write it.

I was just very nervous.

If you're going to walk around with the name "Emmett Till" in your mouth, you better come correct.

Franklin: As much erasure as has gone on around this story, particularly in the South, it is a story that has been told many, many times and from many different angles -- documentary films… Thompson: Yeah.

Franklin: …feature film, books.

What did you feel that you could bring new to this story once you decided to go for it?

Thompson: I mean, there are a couple of things I think that the book does.

You know, one of them, it's very much a profile of whiteness, you know.

Uh, and it's also, like, a deep, deep history into a tiny square of America.

You know, the, the barn is as much a way of thinking as it is a story.

And trying to, in a maximalist way, understand everything acting on the people who were in that barn on that night.

I mean, when you start thinking of the barn as a way of seeing the soul of America, uh, like that's sort of how I would like it to land with people.

Franklin: You absolutely did an incredible job mapping.

I mean… Thompson: The book is a map.

Franklin: Mapping is so key to what you're doing, where you, you use the barn and move out from it.

And then back in to, to the barn.

One of the maps that you draw, if you can call it a map, is also a family tree of the murderers themselves.

Thompson: Yeah.

Franklin: Why did you want to spend so much time looking at the family trees of the, and the histories of the men who murdered Emmett Till?

Thompson: Because everybody in that barn that night had free will.

And you want to understand how two people –- you know, one of them, a decorated combat veteran -- thought that the way to protect his civilization was to torture a 14-year-old child.

Like, how do you get there?

And, like, that to me is, is the question.

In many ways, you know, the story of the, the square of land around the barn is the story of the American South, which is the story of America.

And you feel the closing of horizons, the ending of frontier, the ending of the idea that there might be some better future for you and your people.

And so, you know, in many ways, it's a book about boundaries.

And you know, Emmett Till was 14 and was testing boundaries, and the people who killed him felt besieged by them.

And so, if you're going to understand what happened in that barn that night, you have to understand how everybody in the barn got there.

Franklin: When I read the book, I had this sense of inevitability.

Um, you know… Thompson: Yeah, it's crushing, yeah.

Franklin: When you talk about how Mississippi was essentially owned by all these outside corporations – cotton-producing.

Wright: Yeah.

Franklin: Uh, and that the land really probably shouldn't have ever been lived on because it was so rugged and basically wilderness.

And kind of a sense of claustrophobia and powerlessness that people had.

Thompson: One of the things that's interesting is if you go to the Mississippi Delta today, it looks like a place where there was a failed experiment.

And you realize that, like, you know, the global capital market moved through there and extracted as much wealth as could be extracted and then left everybody in the wreckage.

I mean, you know, the cotton industry collapsed in 1923 and limped along until 1933 when Nylon was invented in the DuPont Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware.

And after that, uh, you know, King Cotton was dead.

I mean, from 1500 to 1933, the most important commodity in the world was cotton.

And so the way to really understand it -- and it was hard for me to figure this out -- but cotton was oil, and that meant that Mississippi was Saudi Arabia.

And so, you know, people in boardrooms wanted their 10% and didn't particularly care how they got it.

And so, everyone in that barn that night absolutely had free will, but the Milams and Bryants were created by those capital markets every bit as much as the sharecroppers were.

Franklin: Now this barn, even though there was a heinous crime that took place in this barn, there's an individual who lives in it who's apparently a nice person by all accounts.

Thompson: He's lovely and yet has no understanding of what any of this has to do with him.

Franklin: And he let you go in.

Thompson: I mean, I spent a tremendous amount of time with him.

Franklin: What's your sense of how that happens, that a site that could be the site of such a crime would have somebody living there still?

That's the erasure.

Thompson: I mean, it's the poi -- the educational system works.

You know, if you don't teach people about something for two generations, it's gone.

And so, you know, he doesn't think it has anything to do with him, because every single person of authority in his life, from the moment he was born, until the day I knocked on his door -- every scoutmaster, every teacher, every football coach, every preacher, every parent and grandparent, aunt and uncle -- everyone had told him that it didn't have anything to do with him.

And so, you know, that works.

People say history will judge.

It does not.

The only thing history does, you know, uniformly is forget.

Franklin: What was it like to go in the barn for the first time?

Thompson: It's real creepy.

I mean, it's, you know, I'm not religious, particularly, and don't believe in crystals and you know, ghosts, but it's menacing, uh, both for the incredible violence that happened there, and also because there's just a… I feel like everything, I feel like, I feel like all the answers to the questions we don't want to ask, not just about our country, but about the sort of, "What lives in the hearts of all men?"

uh, lives inside the darkness of that barn.

And it's very disconcerting to look into it and realize that.

There's a reason that the central theme for Faulkner was the good and evil doing battle inside the soul of every individual human.

You know, there's a reason why this specific land prompted Faulkner to want to explore that.

Franklin: You start the book, and we briefly read about the murder, the torture, and the murder.

It's difficult even reading it cursorily.

You know, I had to almost look away from the page.

I think I did look away.

Thompson: Oh, for sure.

Franklin: The, uh, the night that Emmett Till was taken from his bed… Thompson: Yeah.

Franklin: …his cousin was with him.

That man is still alive and he's a central figure in your book.

Amazing person; as I've heard you say, he should be on money.

Thompson: Yeah.

Franklin: If you can in words, describe what it's like to have known him, to have spent time with him.

Thompson: His name is Reverend Wheeler Parker, and he's a preacher in suburban Chicago, a U.S.

Army veteran.

Uh, he was Emmett Till's cousin, next-door neighbor and best friend.

They were two years apart.

He rode the train south with him to Mississippi and rode the train back to Chicago alone.

And he felt so guilty, a feeling he never really shook, because he survived.

I've gotten to know him really, really well.

We went, you know, I've been all over the country with him.

You know, I took him to the barn for the first time.

First time we went, he wouldn't get out of the vehicle.

Second time, he went and looked.

Uh, I asked him on one of those drives, like, "Hey, what do you think happens when we die?"

And he told me that he had been canvassing all those living people who knew Emmett Till to find out what Emmett Till's spiritual life was like, 'cause he wanted to know if his friend was going to be there to greet him when he got to heaven.

And what he said is, "I hope he's proud of me for the way that I've tried to make sure nobody forgets this story."

Franklin: Most of what Americans knew about this murder came from a very famous magazine article… Thompson: Yeah.

Franklin: …in Look Magazine.

Um, the killers had been, um, acquitted by a jury definitely of their peers.

Thompson: Yeah.

Franklin: Some of them related to them.

Thompson: Yeah.

Franklin: So, there was probably no way that they were ever going to get convicted.

And then because of "double jeopardy, " they took the offer from a reporter who paid them, and they confessed.

And most people knew about the story that way, and there were bald-faced lies after bald-faced lies in that magazine article.

Thompson: Well, it was just totally, I mean, essentially made up.

And the reason it was made up was to write the barn out of the story.

Because the owner of the barn who confessed on his death bed to his preacher that he was one of the people who killed Emmett Till -- uh, the owner of the barn was Leslie Milam, who was JW's full brother and Roy's half-brother.

And, uh, they had to tell the story in such a way that it didn't leave breadcrumbs back to Leslie.

So, they just made up a narrative to protect him.

And then that story was repeated over and over and over and over again, to the point that, like, this is one of the first books that intentionally doesn't grab any details from that story.

Franklin: So that, uh, magazine article did a lot of damage.

And, uh, one of the things it also did was made it seem as if Emmett Till had, you know, said things that, uh, would've made the storekeeper think that she was going to be raped.

Thompson: Yeah.

No, he had a really bad stutter.

He couldn't have said any of this stuff.

Franklin: He did in fact, though, whistle, which is the thing I learned from your book that -- I mean, I learned many things from your book -- but I had always heard "allegedly whistled."

But Reverend Parker, he… Thompson: Was standing next to him when he whistled.

Franklin: …as a boy, was next to him, and has always said that he did it and was just then mortified at what might happen.

Thompson: I think, you know, that's sort of well-intentioned people wanting to protect him.

You know, every lie does damage no matter if you're doing it because you think it's good.

And I think there was a lot of that.

And I think, uh, you know, have to understand, he was 14 years old.

He still loved comic books.

He'd only recently gotten interested in girls.

Uh, he was overweight, he had a stutter.

He got down to Mississippi on the first day of cotton-picking season, and he only lasted half a day in the really hot sun while his cousins were out there crushing it.

And he got sent back to the house to help the women.

And he's on this porch with these older kids, and you know, he's a 14-year-old boy.

I've been a 14-year-old boy.

And I think he was showing off.

And the idea that in the United States of America, you can get tortured and murdered for showing off as a 14-year-old boy is insane.

You talked earlier about you had to look away.

Uh, I mean, I looked away constantly.

Franklin: Yeah, I can't imagine.

I mean, because you're reading all the, all the details.

Since you wrote this book, new papers have emerged.

Thompson: Yep.

Franklin: Um, the granddaughter of the attorney for the men… Thompson: Who I know really, really well.

Franklin: Donated them, and they show beyond a shadow of a doubt the, I could say, collusion between the magazine writer and her grandfather, the attorney, in making this story more salacious and false than it actually was.

And these papers are really important, aren't they?

Thompson: They're…yeah, and you know, it's interesting, a lot of this stuff was, uh, in the, I think, Ohio State archives, that the magazine writer had turned over.

Uh, but everybody sort of thought you'd hit the end of Emmett Till documents.

And then Ellen -- Ellen Whitten is her name -- and you know, her, I think Master's… Franklin: Undergraduate thesis.

Thompson: …undergraduate thesis at Rhodes College in Memphis was disproving the (William) Huie magazine story timeline.

And so, you know, she's been doing this for a really long time.

Franklin: But these are important papers, right, that she… Thompson: Oh, they're incredibly important.

Marcia…donated.

thought it was interesting that -- because a family can destroy something like that very easily, and not have it come to light because it's shameful for the family.

But she didn't do that.

Wright: No, yeah, and also everybody knows, you know what I mean?

All of the shame has already been accrued.

Franklin: So many people went to the grave knowing that they had participated in some way in the torture and death of this child.

Thompson: Yeah.

Franklin: They went to the grave without divulging that or, or confessing, or being held accountable for it.

Thompson: Well, you know... Franklin: It's a big silence.

Thompson: It's an incredible silence.

And you know, Mamie Till said one time; she got asked, "How do you feel that all of these people got away with it?"

And she said, "They didn't get away with it."

And, "What do you mean?"

She was like, "They all got the death penalty.

They all died young, their bodies eaten up with cancer."

Franklin: It's a miracle that -- you know, they put a 70-pound weight around that boy's neck and dropped him off a bridge into a river.

And yet and still that body was found.

Thompson: I stood on the banks of the Tallahatchie River, which local Black people call the "Singing River," because there've been so many bodies thrown in it.

And I stood on the banks with Sharon Wright, who is Emmett's cousin, and Moses Wright's -- I guess, I'm doing math -- great-niece.

And we were standing there, and I was like, "What are you thinking about?"

And she was like, "I'm just so grateful."

I'm like, "What?"

And she said, "He got out of the river."

Franklin: So many don't.

Thompson: Almost no one did.

Franklin: Do you feel that you unearthed new information?

Thompson: Yeah, I mean a ton of stuff.

Found the murder weapon.

Uh, you know, a lot of stuff.

The takeaway for me is that it's shocking that there's still new stuff to find.

And as you mentioned earlier, you know, with the documents that Ellen found in her grandfather's papers, there's still stuff coming to light.

And I mean, I find that both shocking and hopeful.

You know, they tried really hard to bury this, and you know, the truth has its own power.

Franklin: And the gun is in a safe deposit… Thompson: The gun is in a safety deposit box in a bank in Greenwood, Mississippi.

Franklin: And you're the first to have sourced that.

Thompson: Yeah.

Franklin: Did you get a chance to look at it?

Thompson: No.

The FBI, uh, the FBI tried to match the ballistics, but the rounds that killed Emmett were too far degraded.

But they went and shot it.

It still works.

Franklin: Do you think one day that the barn will be part of any kind of tour, or public, uh… Thompson: It's a really difficult site, and so figuring out how to interpret it, which is the word that museum folks use, is very important.

I don't think you're going to be able to buy a ticket and go stand in the space, but I think it will be preserved as some sort of spiritual, uh, you know, place of reflection.

You know, it's, it's interesting, like, you know, I grew up in a house where, you know, my father, who's an Army veteran, you know, cried when he heard the national anthem.

And, you know, I just find the inability to tell the entire American story, the unwillingness to do it, is so weak and Beta, and I just don't… You know, my America is proud of all of our history and proud of the ability to look at it unflinchingly.

And so, you know, I am hopeful that we can one day again have an America that's strong and not weak.

Franklin: And by strong, you mean knows, knows our history?

Thompson: And is just, is just grown up enough to look itself in the mirror.

I mean, that's what being a man is about, or being a human being is about, is, like, looking at yourself and saying, "Well, I messed that up.

Got to do that better.

Got to try to be better tomorrow."

You know, it's also like the root of the Christian faith is, you know, you can, you can be redeemed.

Franklin: As we wrap up, just a couple, a couple last questions.

How do you think we move forward?

Thompson: Well, you know, that's the most complicated question in the entire world.

I mean, you know, there's no way out of the Mississippi Delta, really.

There are no jobs.

There's no work.

The only reason people were there in the first place was to get 10% profit margins on a commodity that is not what it was.

I mean, the Mississippi Delta only existed because cotton was the most important commodity in the world, and it isn't anymore.

I mean, there really shouldn't be anybody living there.

And so, you know, the schools are disasters.

Uh, they're incredibly corrupt.

I mean, the whole place is -- it's like I said in the beginning, this is what a failed experiment looks like.

This is what it looks like when the sort of global capital markets move through a place and then move on.

Franklin: And yet you're wearing a Mississippi T-shirt, and you still live in Mississippi.

Thompson: I'll definitely be buried in Mississippi.

You know there's a -- Eudora Welty was on a book tour one time, and she got asked by an interviewer, uh, probably in a situation, probably in a, you know, scenario just like this, why she still lived in Jackson, Mississippi.

And she looked at him and said, "Because it's home."

Franklin: How did this book change you?

Thompson: I know exactly where me and my people are from.

Franklin: And that changes you in what way?

Thompson: Well, because ignorance is incredibly comforting and uh, you know, almost feels essential sometimes.

Like, I love Mississippi.

I think Mississippi is incredibly complicated.

I think, uh, if Mississippi is going to have any future at all, uh, you know, there has to be some new idea of a tribe of Mississippians.

Uh, you know, Mississippi, it's just, you know, it is forever a work in progress.

And I think that if you really know Mississippi, then you can really know the United States of America.

Franklin: And finally, we've talked a lot about the people around Emmett Till and this murder.

What do you want people to know about Emmett Till, the boy?

Thompson: You know, Emmett Till was just, he was in that strange in-between space between being a boy and a man.

And you know, he was someone's son and someone's friend, and, you know, he, he liked comic books and Bo Diddley.

And you know, there's a storage unit in Chicago right now that the family has, and they don't know what to do with, and inside the storage unit is Emmett Till's bicycle and his toy train.

Franklin: That's very poignant.

Well, thank you for taking the time not only to talk with me and by proxy our viewers, but also to write this book, which um, reminds us of what we need to know.

Thank you.

Thompson: Thank you.

It was a real privilege to be here and to be in Idaho.

Franklin: You've been listening to Wright Thompson, a senior writer at ESPN.com and the author of "The Barn."

Our conversation was taped at the 2025 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.

My thanks to the organizers of that conference for all their help, and for inviting us back to the esteemed event, where we've been conducting interviews since 2005.

If you'd like to watch any of the more than 80 conversations, check them out on Idaho Public Television's YouTube channel.

For Idaho Public Television, I'm Marcia Franklin.

Thanks for tuning in.

(Music) Major funding is provided by the Idaho Public Television Endowment and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.