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The Barn
- The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
- Length: 14 hrs
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Publisher's summary
“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…Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than this.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy: An American Memoir
“An incredible history of a crime that changed America.”—John Grisham
"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.”—Imani Perry
A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long
Wright Thompson’s family farm in Mississippi is 23 miles from the site of one of the most notorious and consequential killings in American history, yet he had to leave the state for college before he learned the first thing about it. To this day, fundamental truths about the crime are widely unknown, including where it took place and how many people were involved. This is no accident: the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing.
In August 1955, two men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were charged with the torture and murder of the 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. After their inevitable acquittal in a mockery of justice, they gave a false confession to a journalist, which was misleading about where the long night of hell took place and who was involved. In fact, Wright Thompson reveals, at least eight people can be placed at the scene, which was inside the barn of one of the killers, on a plot of land within the six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, fabled in the Delta of myth as the birthplace of the blues on nearby Dockery Plantation.
Even in the context of the racist caste regime of the time, the four-hour torture and murder of a Black boy barely in his teens for whistling at a young white woman was acutely depraved; Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to keep the casket open seared the crime indelibly into American consciousness. Wright Thompson has a deep understanding of this story—the world of the families of both Emmett Till and his killers, and all the forces that aligned to place them together on that spot on the map. As he shows, the full horror of the crime was its inevitability, and how much about it we still need to understand. Ultimately this is a story about property, and money, and power, and white supremacy. It implicates all of us. In The Barn, Thompson brings to life the small group of dedicated people who have been engaged in the hard, fearful business of bringing the truth to light. Putting the killing floor of the barn on the map of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, and the Delta, and America, is a way of mapping the road this country must travel if we are to heal our oldest, deepest wound.
Critic reviews
“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
“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 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
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Performance
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Not long after the Berlin Wall fell, three teenagers became friends in the East German town of Jena. It was a time of excitement, but also of economic crisis: some four million East Germans found themselves out of jobs. The friends began attending far-right rallies with people who called themselves National Socialists: Nazis. Like the Hitler-led Nazis before them, they blamed minorities for their ills. From 2000 to 2011, they embarked on the most horrific string of white nationalist killings since the Holocaust. Their target: immigrants.
By: Jacob Kushner
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American Civil Wars
- A Continental History, 1850-1873
- By: Alan Taylor
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.
By: Alan Taylor
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Hitler's People
- The Faces of the Third Reich
- By: Richard J. Evans
- Length: 18 hrs
- Unabridged
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Richard Evans, author of the acclaimed The Third Reich Trilogy and over two dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Germany. Having spent half a century searching for the truths behind one of the most horrifying episodes in human history, in Hitler’s People, he brings us back to the original site of the Nazi movement: namely, the lives of its most important members. Working in concentric circles out from Hitler and his closest allies, Evans forms a typological framework of Germany society under Nazi rule from the top down.
By: Richard J. Evans
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Keeping the Faith
- God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation
- By: Brenda Wineapple
- Length: 15 hrs
- Unabridged
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In 1925, hundreds of people descended on the sleepy town of Dayton, Tennessee, for the “trial of the century,” where a young schoolteacher named John T. Scopes was charged with teaching evolution to his biology class. Darwin’s theory that species evolved over time through natural selection was viewed as a threat to the nation. Two legendary attorneys, Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, drew massive crowds in a trial that quickly became a circus-like media sensation—but it was much more than that.
By: Brenda Wineapple
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The Playbook
- A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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From 1935 to 1939, the Federal Theatre Project staged over a thousand productions in 29 states that were seen by thirty million (or nearly one in four) Americans, two thirds of whom had never seen a play before. At its helm was an unassuming theater professor, Hallie Flanagan. It employed, at its peak, over twelve thousand struggling artists, some of whom, like Orson Welles and Arthur Miller, would soon be famous, but most of whom were just ordinary people eager to work again at their craft. The Playbook takes us through some of its most remarkable productions.
By: James Shapiro
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Fall of Civilizations
- Stories of Greatness and Decline
- By: Paul Cooper
- Narrated by: Paul Cooper
- Length: 19 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Across the centuries, we journey from the great empires of Mesopotamia to those of Khmer and Vijayanagara in Asia and Songhai in West Africa; from Byzantium to the Maya, Inca and Aztecs of Central America; from Roman Britain to Rapa Nui. With meticulous research, breathtaking insight and dazzling, empathic storytelling, historian and novelist Paul Cooper evokes the majesty and jeopardy of these ancient civilizations, and asks what it might have felt like for a person alive at the time to witness the end of their world.
By: Paul Cooper