Starred review from July 15, 2024
A native son dissects one of Mississippi's most shocking racist crimes. With deep roots in Clarksdale, "one of those faded Delta farm towns," Thompson, author ofPappyland, grew up not far from the place where a farmer named J.W. Milam and a storekeeper named Roy Bryant kidnapped Emmett Till, who had allegedly made suggestive remarks to Bryant's wife. The sadistic killing took place in the barn of Thompson's title, which for a long time afterward "was justsome guy's barn, full of decorative Christmas angels and duck-hunting gear...hiding in plain sight, haunting the land." When a sign was erected, years after Till's murder, white racists tore it down; a second one was shot full of holes. The barn still stands. Ironically, Thompson notes, the town where Till was murdered was named for the daughter of one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan--but for all that, he adds, the KKK never gained much of a foothold among white Delta families, the racist murder notwithstanding. Thompson ranges widely in telling Till's story, with one character a Black sharecropper who saw the boy's freshly spilled blood on the floor of the barn and left the state, returning 50 years later when the Department of Justice reopened the murder case. The author's story, intended for readers "everywhere the poison of the Lost Cause has spread," offers hope for a more racially equitable Mississippi. Eventually justice did arc the right way, at least after a fashion: Till's mother noted that her son's killers were shunned by the white community after the killing, no one would rent land to Milam, and, she concluded, "before long, cancer got both of them. They lost their lives for what they did to my boy." A profoundly affecting, brilliantly narrated story of both an infamous murder and its unexpected consequences.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from August 1, 2024
Renowned sportswriter Thompson's Mississippi family farm is 23 miles from the barn in which young Emmett Till was tortured and killed in 1955, yet so diabolical was the cover-up he didn't learn anything about the lynching that helped spur the civil rights movement until he went away to college. Little has changed; historical markers recently erected to mark ""places associated with Till's murder" were stolen or riddled with bullet holes. Determined to bring the full truth to light, Thompson begins his excavation with the lay of the land and continues with the forcing off of the Choctaws, the harsh legacies of slavery and sharecropping, and the rise of the KKK. Thompson chronicles every aspect of Till's family, brief life, murder, and the corrupt trial that followed, including the heroism of the 18-year-old witness, Willie Reed, whom Medgar Evers helped smuggle out of the state after his testimony. As he intimately describes the Delta's fields, decaying towns, entangled families, poverty, hopelessness, resentment, secrets, sorrows, and grit, Thompson also tells tales of Delta blues musicians and honors the valor of Delta civil rights activists past and present. 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.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
October 21, 2024
A forgotten landmark signifies silence and complicity in this sprawling history of the Emmett Till murder. ESPN journalist Thompson (The Cost of These Dreams) revisits the 1955 killing of Till, a 14-year-old Black Chicagoan visiting relatives in Mississippi, for whistling at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. Till was dragged from his bed by Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, her brother-in-law J.W. Milam, and others, who tortured and shot Till and left his body in a river. Bryant and Milam were acquitted at trial and then, protected by double jeopardy laws, confessed to the crime in a self-justifying Look magazine interview. Drawing on his own interviews with eyewitnesses and their relatives, Thompson gives a chilling recap of Till’s murder and outlines the firestorm of publicity that made the case a civil rights touchstone, the willful amnesia about the lynching among whites in Mississippi, and the latter-day movement to commemorate the barn where Till died. The narrative also traces multigenerational histories of families associated with the killing as well as the underlying forces—land values and cotton prices—that ruled their harshly exploitative society. Throughout, Thompson combines meticulous historical sleuthing with dense atmospherics (“The darkness of rural Mississippi remains a physical thing, heavy and alive.... There is no safety outside the civilization of headlights”). It’s a vivid recreation of a shocking crime.