To passersby, it looks like any ordinary wooden barn – but the unassuming exterior hides a chilling truth.
This is the scene of one of the most heinous crimes in American history: the sadistic murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta.
Till was snatched from his bed by four men after allegedly whistling at a white woman in 1955. He was then dragged into the barn in Sunflower county where he was tortured for hours and lynched before being thrown into the Tallahatchie river.
In his new book, ‘The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi,’ author Wright Thompson describes how the outhouse is now ‘hiding in plain sight, haunting the land’.
Today, it belongs to Jeff Andrews, a local dentist who claims he was unaware of its dark history when he purchased the property.
Eerie images reveal how the space is filled with mundane everyday items that are at odds with its horrific past, including Christmas decorations, a lawn mower and even a cross.
‘His Christmas decorations leaned up against the left wall. Within reach lay a lawn mower and a Johnson 9.9-horsepower outboard motor. Gnarled Mississippi River driftwood was stacked in a corner. Dirt covered the spot where Emmett Till died,’ Thomspon writes.
But most chilling of all, is a worn notch still visible on the central wooden rafter beam – the exact spot where Till was hanged.
To passersby, it looks like any ordinary wooden barn but the unassuming exterior hides a chilling truth: the heinous murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till
Eerie images reveal how the space is filled with mundane everyday items that are at odds with its horrific past, including Christmas decorations, a lawn mower and even a cross
Author Wright Thompson, describes the outhouse as ‘hiding in plain sight, haunting the land’ in his new book, ‘The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi’
Thompson, a fifth-generation Mississippi Delta cotton farmer, writes: ‘Jeff had ripped up the floorboards a few years back and hadn’t yet installed anything else in their place. He pointed to the central wooden rafter beam with a notch worn in the center. ‘That right there is where he was hung at’ he said.’
Despite this, there is no marker or any sort of memorial for the brutal murder of the young boy.
Till, an African American teen, lived in Chicago and was visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi, during the summer of 1955 when the crime occurred.
He had gone to buy candy from a rural grocery store where a white woman called Carolyn Donham, then 21, was working behind the counter on August 24.
Donhamn later accused Till of whistling and flirting with her – viewed as a violation of the South’s racist societal codes at the time.
This prompted her then-husband Roy Bryant and brother-in-law J. W. Milam to kidnap and brutally murder the boy just four days later.
The case shocked the world and his devastated mother held a funeral with an open casket to ensure everyone saw what horrors her boy had endured.
Yet Bryant and J.W. Milam were ultimately acquitted of murder. Donham also evaded charges and consequences.
Still today Till’s death remains a defining image of the deep racism that penetrated America’s South in the 1950s.
In his book, Thompson described what Willie Reed, an 18-year-old witness, saw and heard on the night of the murder.
‘Four white men sat shoulder to shoulder in the cab. In the back, three black men sat with a terrified black child. The child was fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. He had two terrible hours left to live.’
‘Willie Reed hid between the road and the barn as he heard Emmett Till cry out in pain. Emmett didn’t make words, just noises, grunts, wild cries,’ he continued.
‘A child’s voice called out in pain, “Lord have mercy!”’
“Get down, you black bastard!” a deeper voice yelled.’
‘“Mama, save me!” the child’s voice cried again.’
in August 1955, 14-year-old Till visited to buy candy and after entering the store, he reportedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant, the white woman who worked behind the counter (pictured). He was lynched just four days later
Thompson, a fifth-generation Mississippi Delta cotton farmer, discusses how Andrews himself seems detached from the barn’s history
Andrews shockingly claimed that if you were to poll elementary school children, ’95 percent of them won’t even know who Emmett Till is’
Till’s autopsy report would later show a broken skull, broken wrist bones, and a broken femur, presenting like a pistol-whipping.
Reed testified about what he saw in court but was laughed at by the all-white jury, and he later had to flee the state to avoid repercussions.
The barn at the time of the crime was owned by J. W. Milam’s brother Leslie.
Andrews is the fourth owner of the barn since Leslie Milam.
Thompson writes that a professor who studies Till once asked him if he’d be willing to sell the barn. ‘Andrews just shrugged. “I like my shed,” he replied finally.’
Andrews claimed that his father only told him about the barn’s history only after he’d signed the papers to buy it.
‘I didn’t even know,’ he said. ‘Really and truly. I didn’t even know about the damn history of the place when I purchased it,’ the owner said.
‘I didn’t find out about that until afterwards. I know my dad knew I was gonna buy that but he never said anything about it. He was around, and hell, he was two miles down the road, so you know damn well he knew all about it. I think he even knew Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam.’
‘They’re all still blown away that this isn’t a big deal to us. It’s in the past. I mean, why would we talk about it on a daily basis? We’re so stigmatized by what everybody else thinks Mississippi is, but it’s like I told them today,’ he added.
Andrews shockingly claimed that if you were to poll elementary school children 95 percent of them wouldn’t even know the story of Emmett Till.
In April 2023, Carolyn Bryant Donham (pictured), the woman whose accusation against Emmett Till led to his lynching, died at the age of 88 without ever facing prosecution
Bryant’s Grocery where Till was accused of whistling at the white owner
A bullet-riddled sign honoring slain civil rights icon Emmett Till
Donham accused Till of wolf-whistling at her in 1955 when he was 14 and she was 21
Thompson also spoke to Stafford Shurden, whose grandparents first bought the house and barn after Leslie Miliam moved out following the trial.
‘He’s lived his whole life in a ten-mile circle, except for college, and he never knew Emmett Till was killed in his hometown, or that one of the key witnesses worked for his relatives,’ Thompson writes. ‘That knowledge never passed a single person’s lips.’
He goes on to explain how Shurden had now come to the conclusion that it was indefensible to pretend it didn’t happen. ‘Now I realize you have to talk about it.’
His grandmother had insisted they move out after only three years because ‘something about it disturbed her’.
‘She always told me she hated it out there,’ Stafford added.
The nearby grocery store where Till was accused of whistling at the owner, meanwhile, is close to disappearing.
Thompson described how there are vines growing over it which are ‘the perfect reflection of the erasure, and of the attempt to pretend like none of this happened.’
‘Till’s murder, a brutal window into the truth of a place and its people, had been pushed almost completely from the local collective memory, not unlike the floodwaters kept at bay by carefully engineered reservoirs and levee walls,’ Thompson concluded.
How Emmett Till’s horrific lynching helped spark the US civil rights movement and remains a rallying cry nearly 70 years after his brutal murder
Chicago teen Emmett Till was visiting relatives in the Deep South in the face of his mother Mamie Till’s misgivings. The child of sharecroppers, Mrs. Till had grown up in the Mississippi Delta before moving to Chicago.
She was uneasy when her uncle, Mose Wright, invited the boy to come and stay with him outside the tiny Delta town of Money in August 1955.
Emmett was self-confident and a prankster who was well built and looked far older than his 14 years. Mrs. Till worried that this would go against him in the Deep South.
During Bryant and Milam’s trial much was made of Till’s stature, and he was repeatedly and wrongly referred to as a ‘man’ despite his tender years.
Money had one main street on which stood the Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. On Wednesday August 24, Till and his cousins drove into Money to go to that store.
Till had supposedly boasted of his success at chatting up white girls in Chicago and one of his cousins said, as a challenge, there was a pretty one inside the store.
What happened next has been a source of contention for close to 70 years. Witnesses said that Till broke the Mississippi, Jim Crow-era custom that dictated black people should leave cash on the counter by placing it directly in Donham’s hand.
In court Donham testified that Till ‘grabbed’ her hand and said, ‘How about a date baby?’ She went further and said he put his hands on her waist and told her, ‘You needn’t be afraid of me baby. I been with white girls before.’
Emmett Till was visiting his great-uncle outside the tiny Delta town of Money, Mississippi in August 1955 at the time of his death
Till, left, and his cousin Wheeler Parker, back right, are pictured on their bicycles.
Donham never mentioned this physical contact in statements made before the trial prompting many to accuse her of inventing the details to aid her husband.
Four days later in the early hours of Sunday morning Till’s great-uncle Wright was woken by Bryant and Milman banging on his door. They were armed and demanding he take them to ‘the n***** who did the talking.’
She claimed that she was afraid, so afraid that she ran for a gun but Till had already left.
Till’s great-uncle, Wright, told the court that when the men frog marched the terrified teen from the house, they took him to their truck in which someone else was sitting. He recalled them asking the person if this was the boy and that they replied in a voice that was ‘lighter than a man’ that it was.
It has long been speculated that the voice of affirmation was Donham’s.
Till’s body was found three days later, by a boy out fishing in the Tallahatchie River. He had been weighted down by the 75lb-fan of a cotton gin, tied around his neck with barbed wire garrote.
His injuries were so gruesome, his suffering so great, that his great-uncle could only identify him by a ring that he was wearing.
In the aftermath of her son’s death Mrs. Till insisted that he have an open casket, so that the world could see just what men driven by violent racial hatred had done to her son.
Donham’s husband at the time Roy Bryant (pictured with one of the couple’s sons at his trial) and his brother JW Milam were tried for Till’s murder. It took the all-white male jury just 40 minutes to return a verdict of not guilty
Roy Bryant, (right) and half-brother, JW Milam, (left) were arrested for his lynching, but acquitted. The pair later admitted guilt, but couldn’t be prosecuted due to double-jeopardy laws
Emmett’s mother Mamie, who insisted on having an open casket funeral to expose the atrocities committed on her son, became an activist and spoke of her son as the ‘sacrificial lamb’ of the Civil Rights movement for which contributions soared in the aftermath of his death. She died in 2003 at the age of 81
She rejected the undertaker’s advice to have a closed casket or his offer to ‘touch up’ Till’s appearance saying, ‘Let the people see what I’ve seen. Everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till.’
In the end 50,000 people filed past his casket at a church in Chicago’s southside.
It took the all-white male jury just 40 minutes to return a verdict of not guilty in Bryant and Milam’s trial. The ‘victory’ was celebrated with gunshots around the courthouse and Donham and Bryant kissed passionately for the cameras.
Four months later Bryant and Milam gave an interview to ‘Look’ magazine in which they spoke of their guilt – safe in the knowledge that they could not be retried under the double-jeopardy rule. They were paid $4000 (roughly $36,000 by today’s standards).
Mrs. Till, who died in 2003, became an activist and spoke of her son as the ‘sacrificial lamb’ of the Civil Rights movement for which contributions soared in the aftermath of his death.
