By: William Miller
The barn could be neither more plain nor less imposing.
Little cared for, seeming underappreciated. Unpainted wood. Board-and-batten sides, roof of tin. Long and narrow, yet, in the whole length of it, only six windows, arranged in two blocks of three each, high up on one wall. Not much light gets in except through the holes and cracks in the walls.
There probably was not much light to come through those windows anyway in the middle of the night or even in the early morning that time in 1955 when 14-year-old Emmett Till was tortured and murdered in that barn near Drew, Mississippi. But it had to be tough for a lone Black youth facing a squad of White men, in the dark, those men seeming intent on life-ending torture.
The late Rep. John Lewis once referred to Emmett Till as “my George Floyd.”
The barn is being acquired by the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi, with the goal of preserving it in perpetuity. Marking its acquisition and the start of their stewardship, officials of the interpretive center observed the 70th anniversary of Till’s murder with a three-day-long series of events at the end of August, including a wreath laying at the barn itself. The interpretive center contracted with a local dentist to acquire the barn. He obtained it without knowing its history.
Not long before the ceremonies, Jessie Daynes-Diming, special projects coordinator for the interpretive center, led a small group toward the barn, stopping to roll up its one, small metal shed-like door. With the door about a foot up, she stepped way back, and the visitors, taking cues from her, stepped back, too. Wasps and mud daubers swarmed and flew, in and out, beneath the door, through the cracks and holes and weather- and squirrel-eaten gaps between the boards of the barn.
The sum of Mississippi, of course, is not this barn. The state has been the home of some of America’s most prominent writers, influential not only within the country but earning international followings and awards. William Faulkner, Eudora Welty. Jesmyn Ward, Shelby Foote. Richard Wright, Willie Morris. John Grisham, Donna Tartt. Even Tennessee Williams, despite his first name.
Mississippi also is home to some of the country’s biggest stage and screen stars, as well as sports figures. Elvis Presley came from Tupelo, Mississippi. And Oprah Winfrey and Walter Payton also hailed from the state. James Earl Jones was born there, and Morgan Freeman has been hanging out there a lot in recent years; he was born in Memphis but spent a lot of his youth in Mississippi with family. He now co-owns a blues club there, and of course Mississippi is called the birthplace of the blues. B.B King was from there and is buried there. Coca-Cola was first bottled there, and so was Barq’s Root Beer.
At one point, not long after the Civil War, Mississippi’s population was predominantly black, a fact not reflected in voter rolls. More recent data shows the state with a White, non-Hispanic population about 55.4 percent of the total, and Black about 36.9 percent.
Still, the barn compels attention. It originally was meant to be, and long was used as, a seed barn. No one knows quite when it was built, there being few records for that. It sits less than 100 yards from a comfortable-looking house built more recently. The house—white wood and red-brick exterior, and in-ground pool with a brick wall around it—sits on a bit of a hill, probably created when they dug out more for the waterway, pond the house overlooks.
This is the kind of juxtaposition one finds in the Mississippi Delta, an old barn apparently of no consequence and a relatively new house of obvious consequence much more recently built.
After several minutes with the roll-up door open and the wasps and daubers going in and out, a visitor stepped up, raised the door high enough to maneuver under, and went in. He found that as long as he ignored the wasps and daubers, didn’t swat or slap at them, they left him alone. The barn was being used to store unused equipment of various sorts. Some farm equipment, mowers and tractors, but a lot of smaller tools and whatnot—wheelbarrows; hand tools like shovels, rakes, and pitchforks; some more recently placed items. Family-goods storage.
Ms. Daynes-Diming says the interpretive center will get, along with the barn itself, a parcel of land to allow the center to bring visitors onto the site by van and to have facilities for unloading the visitors, turning around the vans, re-boarding the visitors for the trip back to the interpretive center a half-hour away. The facilities for visitors will be developed over time, she says. For now, it would be enough to stabilize the barn, preserve it.
The barn and Till’s murder are considered triggers for the modern Civil Rights movement. The writer David Halberstam, who was not from Mississippi, wrote about the trial and is quoted by the interpretive center as calling it “the first great media event of the civil rights movement.” Till casts a kind of ever-present shadow over the state. Today, near downtown Greenwood, Mississippi, in another part of the Delta, there stands a statue of Till, roughly life-size, bronze, created by artist Matt Glenn, funded and commissioned by the state legislature, the Leflore County Board of Supervisors and the Greenwood City Council.
Greenwood also is the place where they filmed some of the home-and-yard scenes for the movie The Help. Other scenes in that movie were shot in the Fondren section of Jackson, the state capital, east of the Delta.
What started the Emmett Till events was his coming from Chicago with his cousin on a train to visit his great-uncle and other family members in the area of Money, Mississippi. It was August 21, 1955, before the Civil Rights marches and moves that led to passage of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, etc. But it was not long after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision that held that separate school systems for Blacks and Whites were not equal and, therefore, that the schools must integrate. That didn’t happen, of course, for a long while, almost two decades in some portions of the South. 
During his visit in Money, Till and his cousin went to the Bryant family grocery—on the afternoon of August 24—and Till went inside to buy candy. Mrs. Carolyn Bryant, who was White, was inside the store. Till chose some candy and later was accused first of touching Mrs. Bryant’s hand as money for the purchase and the change back to him passed between them, and then, outside the store, when Mrs. Bryant came out, too, he is alleged to have whistled at her. On August 28, several days his visit to the store, Till was rousted out of bed in his uncle’s house early in the morning, and was taken to the barn, where he was tortured and killed. His body was weighted down with a fan motor and thrown into the Tallahatchie River, where it was found by a young fisherman.
The Emmett Till Interpretive Center sits in Sumner, Mississippi, across the street from the courthouse where two men, Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother J.W. Milam, were tried for Till’s murder in September, 1955.
The courthouse still is in use and has been designated a U.S. National Park. The courthouse is located in a square in the center of town, around which is located a series of storefronts and offices. The interpretive center is housed in one of the storefronts converted for its use.
The Second-District Tallahatchie County Courtroom is on the second floor of the building and today looks much the same as it did then, thanks to restoration work undertaken by the interpretive center and National Park Service.
According to the interpretive center’s presentation, at the trial, the Till family members sat at a card table that was set up for them as well as members of the black press. NAACP field secretaries including Medger Evers, who later would be assassinated as he stepped out of his car in Jackson, Mississippi, and Ruby Hurley, searched for witnesses and found several who could testify, including Till’s uncle, Moses Wright, from whose house Till was taken. Wright identified the accused duo as the men who took Till from his house, marking one of the first times a Black man had stood in a witness stand and accused a White man of a crime. Other witnesses also said they saw Till with the two men.
The trial lasted five days, three of them dedicated to witness testimony. The all-white, all-male jury deliberated for a little more than an hour before bringing in a verdict of not-guilty. Both men later said in an interview sold to Look magazine that they did it.
Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, wanted her son’s body returned to Chicago for burial. And she wanted the casket left open. She wanted everyone to see what they had done to her son. The magazine Jet carried a photo of his exploded face.
On the corner of the town square where the courthouse sits also stands a white stone statute dedicated to “Our Heroes,” erected by the William Fitzgerald Chapter, No. 686, of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, on June 3, 1913. The inscription reads:
For truth dies
not and by her
light they raise
the flag whose
starry folds have
never trailed;
and by the low
tents of the
deathless deed
they left the
cause that never
yet has failed
-Virginia F. Boyle.
To the Tallahatchie
Rifles and all who served
from this county.
Half-hour intervals of driving are important in the Emmett Till story. From his uncle’s house, from which he was taken, it is at least a half-hour’s drive to the barn. From the barn to the Tallahatchie River where his body was found, it is at least another half hour. But it was a matter of days between the precipitating event and the taking of Emmett Till by two men that then led to everything afterward.
It is hard to explain or even understand the emotions that led to the events involving Emmett Till, given the distances and the times in between. So much time for cooling off, for high emotions to recede, for anger to dissipate. This could not have been that kind of time, that kind or mind of intentionality.
The reality is like the difference between a parent tapping a child who is misbehaving and a person smashing a bug.
***
William Miller has been writing notes on his visits to the American South for the Cheuse Center. In 2024 he visited Memphis and that piece appeared here. By commissioning these pieces, the Cheuse Center connects conversations between American spaces and the world, inspired by the work of James Baldwin and the Baldwin100 project.
Miller directed the creative writing program at George Mason University for more than two-dozen years until his retirement in 2018. During that time, he helped establish the Cheuse Center, the Fall for the Book literary festival, the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree program in creative writing, and Stillhouse Press. Negotiations to bring the Poetry Daily web-based contemporary poetry distribution program to Mason began in his last year in the director’s position. He serves on the board of Fall for the Book, and is the current board chair of the Cheuse Center. Listen to his podcast episode, with the Upstart Crow, talking about the impact of James Baldwin, with David Baldacci here: ‘What is a Calamity of Souls’
August 29, 2025