← Pablo Torre Finds Out
Pablo Torre Finds Out
How Emmett Till Got Erased from the History Books, with Wright Thompson
00:47:10
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- [00:01]
Pablo Torre
Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out I am Pablo Torre. And today we're gonna find out what this sound is.
- [00:07]
Wright Thompson
We have to create a tribe of us before we do anything else.
- [00:12]
Pablo Torre
Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraffe Kings. This is the best thing you've written.
- [00:36]
Wright Thompson
I mean it's a weird question, but I sort of.
- [00:39]
Pablo Torre
It wasn't even a question.
- [00:40]
Wright Thompson
No, it's.
- [00:40]
Pablo Torre
I just think it's, it's this book. The new book, the Barn is the best thing I've read you write.
- [00:48]
Wright Thompson
This is going to sound crazy. I feel like everything else I've ever written is prelude and practice. To be able to do this right and not it up it is reported.
- [00:58]
Pablo Torre
I want people to know about the fact that this is investigative journalism that is cinematic and even that word I'm already catching myself because it's, it's, it's about what really happened.
- [01:11]
Wright Thompson
Yeah.
- [01:12]
Pablo Torre
In a story that I knew so much less than I realized.
- [01:15]
Wright Thompson
Well, that's the. What got started for me. I mean the Emmett Till murder, which is at the center of this book. And we'll get into all the other things around it, but the Emmett Till murder is one of the most famous murders in American history. I mean to me it's up there with Abraham Lincoln in terms of killings that forever shaped this country. And so we think we know a lot about it.
- [01:39]
Narrator
Emmett Till's body was found in The Tallahatchie River, August 31, 1955. A week before this 14 year old Chicagoan vacationing in the Mississippi Delta had whistled at a white woman, 21 year old Carolyn Bryant. On September 6, 1955, two white men were charged with Emmett's murder. Roy Bryant, husband of Carolyn Bryant and J.W. milam, his half brother.
- [02:04]
Wright Thompson
When you really get under the hood a you find out that we don't really know that much about it and we're continually finding things out. Jerry Mitchell, like the great investigative journalist in Mississippi, found something new after this went to the printing press. I mean we're still finding things out. And then what you find out is that the lack of knowledge isn't just because of the effects of time. It is intentional. It was an erasure that started almost immediately after the murder and continues. And so the book is uncovering new things about the murder, but also tries to contextualize why it happened, where it happened and why the erasure happened.
- [02:50]
Pablo Torre
How did you get the idea to do this book? Where did it start?
- [02:54]
Wright Thompson
I was at home during the pandemic. And were you still at ESPN then? Or no.
- [03:00]
Pablo Torre
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [03:01]
Wright Thompson
So, you know, we all got grounded. I remember I had been on the road my whole life and I didn't know what to do. So I started trying to think of stories I could report in archives and things I could do that didn't require getting on airplanes. So I started a story in which I was going to do the family tree of every member of LeBron James's Los Angeles Lakers. And so I started, I mean, I was doing Dwight, I was doing LeBron, I got LeBron's family back to Albany, Georgia. And so I was doing Avery Bradley.
- [03:33]
Pablo Torre
I like how this story begins with.
- [03:37]
Wright Thompson
Avery Bradley, first of all, like separate. We should do a whole issue on how Avery Bradley is the most underrated player in NBA history.
- [03:44]
Pablo Torre
I want the story that you're describing, frankly. I want the genealogy of the bubble Lakers dude.
- [03:50]
Wright Thompson
It was incredible. And so Avery Bradley's family is from Mount Bio, which is very close to where I'm from. I mean, it's eight or 10 miles from my family farm. It's also very close to the barn. That's a whole thing if you don't know the history of Mount Bio. It is an all black town that was founded by the freed former enslaved people who worked for Jefferson Davis family, the president of the Confederacy. And they started a town in Mississippi, in Mississippi. And it's still there. And so Avery Bradley's father's side of his family is from there. He would go there in the summer. And so I started googling around and found that one of the witnesses in the Emmett Till murder and in the trial was a woman named Amanda Bradley. And so there was a moment where I wondered, is Avery Bradley related to one of the witnesses in the Emmett Till case? And so I started calling around to Emmett Till scholars. I don't think that he is, but in the process of doing that, this guy named Patrick Weems, who runs the Emmett Till Interpretive center, who's one of the main characters of the book, said to me, have you ever been to the barn? And I said, what barn? And he just said, we need to take a R.
- [05:24]
Pablo Torre
What did you know growing up going to school in Mississippi, how was it described all of this stuff?
- [05:30]
Wright Thompson
It wasn't. I mean, I found my old history book and it's not mentioned the Mississippi history book, like stops, I think, like at World War II. This is so crazy that I had to text somebody I went to high school with and be like, am I remembering this right or is this become like urban legend? No, this is true. Our 8th grade American history teacher called the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression. I mean, this is, you know, we weren't taught any of this. I didn't know the name Emmett Till until a New south history class at the University of Missouri didn't know any of it. And one of the propulsive questions of the book is like, how is that possible? And you know, and, and I try to answer that in an actual, like an investigative, sincere way, you know, a mapping of silence and how this is possible. I mean, the best word to describe it is omerta.
- [06:23]
Pablo Torre
You call it that in the book, this omerta between fathers and sons, this thing that, by the way, neither black nor white people seem to enjoy reliving, talking about in the Delta.
- [06:35]
Wright Thompson
No, people don't talk about it, but like the project is a deep mapping of the land around the barn where it happened.
- [06:49]
Pablo Torre
Okay, so I just need to establish here the conventional understanding of what happened to Emmett Till, because Wright Thompson's new book, which is also unsparingly personal as we'll discuss, was the first thing that ever really made me think about the barn. The barn where Emmett Till was actually murdered. I had heard about the grocery store, the place where Emmett Till had whistled at 21 year old Carolyn Bryant back in 1955. And I had heard about the photos, had actually seen the photos, the famously disturbing pictures of a disfigured Emmett Till in an open casket at his funeral. The photos that Emmett's mother explicitly wanted America to see an all white jury would acquire quit Roy Bryant and J.W. milam, two men who beat and mutilated and shot Emmett in the head, making sure to sink his body in the nearby Tallahatchie River. But later we would learn Roy Bryant and J.W. milam confessed to look magazine and writer William Bradford Huey that they did it. It was them. The two of them had killed this black kid who was just visiting from Chicago, visiting his relatives, and whose death sparked the civil rights movement in the process.
- [08:18]
Wright Thompson
Rosa Parks famously said that when she was sitting on that bus and got asked to move, she thought about Emmett Till.
- [08:25]
Pablo Torre
Yes. And this is a 14 year old.
- [08:28]
Wright Thompson
Boy who just turned 14, who liked comic books and Bo Diddley and, you.
- [08:34]
Pablo Torre
Know, I mean, like, was a little chubby, as you write, had a stutter. Had a stutter.
- [08:40]
Wright Thompson
So by the way, he couldn't have possibly said the things that Carolyn Bryant said he said.
- [08:46]
Pablo Torre
And so Carolyn Bryant, the woman at the center of this, who told a bunch of people that Emmett Till had done a bunch of stuff which is in question.
- [08:57]
Wright Thompson
There's a screen door. There's no air conditioning. In 1955, they could. Everybody on the porch of that store could hear everything inside that store. And, you know, one of the things that's interesting is if you get the. The notes taken by the defense attorneys, you can watch her story change. And so one of the things that's so interesting is the defense attorneys essentially wrote the famous look magazine story. That was the confession that until, frankly, this book, details from it found their way into every history to the point that the Secretary of the Interior came to Mississippi to investigate, making an Emmett and Mamie Till National Memorial and was taken to places and emotionally told stories that were all fiction, because people are still using details from the Huey account. So when you go read this story and then you go find the notes of the lawyers, they're quotes that Huey wrote down from the lawyers that appear in the story in the mouths of the killers. Right.
- [10:01]
Pablo Torre
Huey being the author of the.
- [10:02]
Wright Thompson
Huey being the author of the look magazine story. William Bradford Huey. And that whole story was written to erase the barn. J.W. milam and Roy Bryant were half brothers, different fathers, same mother, super inbred. They had different fathers, but the same grandfathers, you know.
- [10:27]
Pablo Torre
Noted.
- [10:28]
Wright Thompson
Yeah. And so it was a whole tribe of brothers, and it was super violent with a history of. Of doing like this. And so they took Emmett that night to Leslie Milam's barn, who was their brother. That's where it all went down. And Leslie Milam was never arrested and tried, so he wasn't protected by double jeopardy. So when they did the confession, they had to change all of these details to write him out of it. And so the erasure of the barn is so emblematic of the overall erasure, you know, Leslie Milam in 1974, his wife Francis, who was a hairdresser in Cleveland, Mississippi, she called up Macklin Hubble, who was their preacher, the Baptist preacher. And Macklin, in his 90s, sat on his deck in Cleveland and told me this story. He has since passed, but he was alive when I was reporting. He gets a phone call, and it's Francis saying, leslie would like to see you. And he goes over to the house, and Leslie Milam is laid out, like, in his pajamas on the couch in the front room, bunch of light. And Leslie confesses to him that he was one of the people who killed Emmett Till. And Reverend Macklin was angry and irritated because it didn't feel sincere. Felt like he was, like, trying to lawyer his way to heaven. Like, if I say this now, I'm probably fine. And so they prayed together. And then the preacher left. And Leslie Milam didn't make it to morning. I mean, that was the last day of his life. He confessed, literally, on his deathbed. And, you know, I think he was 57. All of these guys died young, riddled up with cancer. There's this beautiful moment where somebody asked Mamie Till.
- [12:20]
Pablo Torre
Yes.
- [12:21]
Wright Thompson
How do you feel that they got away with murder? And she said, what are you talking about? They got the death penalty. Every one of them died young, painful and ostracized for what they did to my boy.
- [12:33]
Francis Milam
From time to time, I've heard rumors of Milam and Brian. I know that both of them lost two sons each. Their little sons were about the same age, four down. And they did not have the pleasure of spending their lives with their sons. And I do know that they thought they were heroes, but when their backers backed up and would not support them, they spent a very miserable life wondering, we are the heroes, and all of a sudden, we are nobody. So I'm sure that they paid. They're both deceased now, but I am sure that they paid for their error. But another thing.
- [13:26]
Pablo Torre
I know when you look through the story of how it is that the barn got erased, you mentioned, of course, the famous look magazine story. But I also want to put this into larger context, because so much of this. Part of the reason, the degree of difficulty was the way it was, was because actual legal documents, the murder weapon, all of these artifacts that would reveal the truth, they. They disappear.
- [13:52]
Wright Thompson
So, like, I got a call and talked to a guy who. He and his sister own the murder weapon, which was handed to their father, I think, from Sheriff Strider, if I remember correctly. When I talked to him. It was in a bank and a safety deposit box in Greenwood, Mississippi, just sitting there like the menace of that. It still fires. The gun still fires. The FBI shot it not that long, like 20 years ago. And, I mean, the erasure is staggering. I mean, what's the other one you just mentioned?
- [14:23]
Pablo Torre
Oh, I mean, just the courthouse missing files.
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Wright Thompson
Oh. The file folder in the courthouse of the most famous trial to ever happen in the courthouse was empty. If you go to the Ole Miss library and pull out the look magazine, it's there, but the story's torn out. I mean, over and over and over again. You find that this is just not spoken of.
- [14:44]
Pablo Torre
At one point, you get a thumb drive in the mail, which is the.
- [14:49]
Wright Thompson
Carolyn Bryant's unpublished memoir.
- [14:51]
Pablo Torre
So the Carolyn Bryant memoir, just to spell it out here, it fundamentally Accuses Emmett till, recently turned 14 year old, of being overtly sexually aggressive.
- [15:03]
Wright Thompson
She took the lie to the grave, which is its own kind of crazy. The FBI agent who is maybe knows more about this than anyone. A guy named Dale Killinger who's really incredible. One of the things he said was that the FBI profilers at, I think Quantico told him, look, she's going to be really hard to crack because she's told this lie so many times now that she probably believes it. Which is also interesting, which is the point of erasure and the point of telling your children and grandchildren a lie about who they are and where they come from. Because if you tell it enough, it becomes true.
- [15:41]
Pablo Torre
I want to get back to just the way in which this whole story, for all of its width, for all of its depth, it is also familiar while also being, for many of the people who will read it, alien. And it's because when you see how the story of Emmett Till's murder was spun, edited, erased, reframed, resold, monetized over and over again, there are just so many familiar echoes. The photo, for instance, that got released of Carolyn Bryant as this innocent beauty queen. The framing of Emmett Till as a man, as a young man, as opposed to a 14 year old who just turned 14.
- [16:21]
Wright Thompson
And the press operation of Senator Eastland was driving a lot of this. It was a very sophisticated press operation. And so, like, you know, there are many people who think that it was the senator's press office who leaked the beauty queen picture. None of it was random.
- [16:38]
Pablo Torre
The allegations, by the way, that actually this whole thing was an NAACP plot. Communist agitators. This is all from present day. Present day.
- [16:48]
Wright Thompson
So, like, if this is real, this is what the jury said happened. This was the defense's theory of the case that they all bought. They said that the naacp, in cahoots with the Communist party, went and got a body out of a Chicago morgue, took it to Mississippi, threw it in the Tallahatchie river, hoping that someone would find it and that that body was thrown there. And the whole story of Emmett Till was concocted. And Mamie Till was a communist plant who had been paid off with a phony life insurance policy on her son Emmett, who was alive in Chicago or Detroit. And all of the, and all of the witnesses, these sharecroppers who risked their lives and all of them who had to go live in exile, they were all communist plants, I guess, like Manchurian candidates. You know, you're going to be a sharecropper for three Generations so that we can activate you. All of this was done to make white Mississippians look bad, because the dignity and reputation of white Mississippians was an essential bedrock part of protecting democracy. That's what they believed happened.
- [18:24]
Pablo Torre
So much of the book is also stuff that I didn't know about you. When you write about how your whole early life was surrounded by a fable of lost grandeur and that your family has owned your current farm for more than a century, one day you might even run it. Your family's always called it a planting company, avoiding, of course, the more famous.
- [18:44]
Wright Thompson
Infamous term a plantation. You know, my mother says they weren't allowed to use the word plantation growing up. They didn't get rid of the land. But let's not use the word, you know.
- [18:55]
Pablo Torre
But I'm flipping to page 213 of your book. I'm just wondering if you could read the segment that I have sort of like bracketed. Just start there because it is about your ancestry, but your genealogy.
- [19:09]
Wright Thompson
As the descendants of liberals and conservatives, of owners of enslaved people and civil rights crusaders, I usually find it slimy to judge them from the moral safety of the future. It's trendy for Southern writers to find a straw ancestor in their past. I find that generally disgusting. But the actions of a few of my family during this terrible year, when faced with an easy, cowardly choice and a hard, brave one, left a terrible stain on our name. Look, I'll tell you, my great grandfather, Ellis Wright, who's in this book, I desperately tried to avoid putting him in the book because, like, this is the thing that I'm going to eat about, like, at the. At Thanksgiving. And he made it impossible. He kept inserting himself into the news cycle in 1955. Oh, in public, like, these aren't family stories that I sort of told out of school. This is all on the Internet.
- [20:04]
Pablo Torre
The Jackson Citizens Council, dude, founded in 55 was what?
- [20:09]
Wright Thompson
The Jackson Citizens Council is essentially the white collar clan. So instead of direct acts of violence, they would use rhetoric to wind other people up to commit acts of violence, which is not a conspiracy theory. One of Milam's defense attorneys actually said, we need men like Milam to fight our wars and keep the N words in line. I mean, these are direct quotes. And so the Citizens council would. Would wind up people to do their dirty work for them. And also just extreme economic coercion. It's like the Klan and the Chamber of Commerce had a baby. And so my great grandfather founded the largest chapter in the state of Mississippi.
- [20:53]
Pablo Torre
And this man, Ellis Wright is who I'm named after.
- [20:57]
Wright Thompson
I didn't want to write this story if it's just another person telling the story of EMT till.
- [21:02]
Pablo Torre
Right. The idea of this being a, a serialistic people's history.
- [21:07]
Wright Thompson
That's right.
- [21:08]
Pablo Torre
And the people in this case are your people.
- [21:11]
Wright Thompson
That's right.
- [21:12]
Pablo Torre
Something that I came to this book with is this question of why is Wright Thompson the person who should be taking on this with the ambition aspiration of. I'm going to tell you a story that is criminally and that is a loaded and accurate word in this context. Underreported.
- [21:32]
Wright Thompson
Well, and especially the. It's underreported in, you know, how everyone arrived in this place on this night and you know, like, there are many, many new things in the book. And it, it's not because I'm Woodward and Bernstein, it's because there's so much still to do. I mean, like, well, two things. I mean, one, the, the idea that like these are my people and this world. You know, my mother is really, really active on Facebook politically. She and I share a political bent.
- [22:04]
Pablo Torre
What a dangerous description for a parent, really, dude.
- [22:08]
Wright Thompson
And. But she, and like it scared. She lives alone in these like right wing nut jobs are like, I'm gonna have to go over and like shoot somebody, you know, and like it's scary. And so I asked her one time, I'm like, what do you say you win an argument? Then you've won an argument on the Internet and who cares? And what she said to me and made me realize that I was wrong was that she grew up in The Mississippi Delta, 15 miles from this barn. Closer, really. You know, she was in high school in Shelby, Mississippi, during Freedom Summer when there were marches in Shelby and she didn't know anything about it. The seating of the delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party has political and moral significance. Far beyond the borders of Mississippi are the halls of this convention. And she realized that she had been cloistered and that the main instrument of the cloister is silence. And that she promised herself, when her eyes were open and the veil was lifted, she realized that if I ever have the chance to do it again, I will never be silent. And so, you know, this is a mapping of many things, but one of the main things it's a mapping of, is a mapping of intentional, constructed silence and of the world that creates and the people and tribe of people that creates. Like, it's interesting, Jeff Andrews, the guy who currently owns the barn, who let it be said, is lovely and you know Has a great relationship with the Till family.
- [23:41]
Pablo Torre
A dentist.
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Wright Thompson
He's a dentist. And he's like a really. He's a really nice guy. He understands that. The emotional content of this building for other people, but doesn't quite understand what it has to do with him. His grandparents moved into the area with a government program in the 1930s, when the US government was essentially taking over the farm economy. Like a 40 acres and a mule sort of situation. So he grew up. I mean, his family grew up with an eye shot of this barn. He buys it in 1994 and has no idea of its history. I believe him. I've. I've known him for years. And then when he bought it, then his father told him, like, you know, the silence is deeply hardwired.
- [24:30]
Pablo Torre
The self investigation, the. The feeling of, I have work to do here.
- [24:36]
Wright Thompson
It feels like, look, I'm. My daughters are going to be Mississippi Delta farmers, and there's a world in which, you know, this is a user's manual.
- [24:46]
Pablo Torre
Oh, man.
- [24:46]
Wright Thompson
Like an owner's manual for this land.
- [24:48]
Pablo Torre
And your daughters will read this book and they'll get to the part where you are unsparing about how you yourself view the Confederate flag in high school.
- [24:56]
Wright Thompson
Dude, I love the Confederate flag in high school. It just didn't occur to me when you talk about the intentional erasure and the, you know, Mississippi schools didn't integrate until 1970. And then when they integrated, there was an immediately a parallel segregated school system that still exists. I mean, in many ways, it's cr. It's crumbling now. But it's funny, the only way it turns out in 2024, for a segregation academy to survive is to integrate.
- [25:23]
Pablo Torre
Right.
- [25:23]
Wright Thompson
Which I find beautiful and delicious. But like the War of Northern Aggression, we were taught a very specific story. And that teaching worked. And so one of the things I hope is, look, I really hope that kids like me in bedroom suburbs of Birmingham and Atlanta and Charlotte and kids in the Mississippi Delta and kids in Alabama and Georgia and Tennessee and Arkansas and Louisiana and Virginia and North Carolina and South Carolina. I hope that they read it and it becomes the Southern. Howard Zen. I don't know the right way to.
- [26:01]
Pablo Torre
Say it, but it is what you've constructed here. It's true. What you call it. It's a secret history.
- [26:08]
Wright Thompson
Yeah.
- [26:09]
Pablo Torre
Of how the Mississippi Delta came to be defined by its rich land and poor people.
- [26:14]
Wright Thompson
That's right.
- [26:15]
Pablo Torre
By extreme structured value attached to dirt and a corresponding worthlessness attached to life.
- [26:21]
Wright Thompson
And the thing you realize is that. So one of the first owners of land in Township 22 North Range 4 West was the Delta Pine and Land Company, which was later owned by the Manchester Fine Doublers and Spinners association in England.
- [26:37]
Pablo Torre
Manchester, England.
- [26:38]
Wright Thompson
And so one of the things I didn't realize is that Mississippi was. From the invention of the cotton gin until the federal government takeover in the New Deal of the American farming economy in 1933, Mississippi served as a colony for Manchester, Liverpool, London and New York. You know, Money Mississippi is famously where Emmett Till whistled.
- [27:05]
Pablo Torre
Yeah.
- [27:05]
Wright Thompson
The name actually being Money Mississippi. The money planning company was owned by Charles Merrill of Merrill Lynch. The global river of capital flowed through here because, you know, 1933 is also when synthetics were really invented in Dupont.
- [27:22]
Narrator
Laboratories, makers of better things for better living through chemistry.
- [27:29]
Pablo Torre
And that name is all over this.
- [27:31]
Wright Thompson
All over this book.
- [27:32]
Pablo Torre
Dupont.
- [27:33]
Wright Thompson
Yeah. And until then, cotton was oil in Mississippi was Saudi Arabia. And so. Yes, and so what's so interesting is Mississippi has never been governed for the benefit of its citizens, by the way, any of its citizens. And the capital required that one group of those citizens turn on another group of those citizens to extract the 10% profit margins that were flowing to everybody. And then when the, when the global economy moved on, you were left with a caste system that had outlived its justification and its reasons. And instead of going away, it actually doubled down on itself.
- [28:26]
Pablo Torre
The Carolyn Bryant stuff, even the more sort of zoomed out notion of why at the core of this whole story, you find sex, the threat of it.
- [28:39]
Wright Thompson
Southern men, no group of people in America have thought more about sex because like all that, that's essentially what segregation is about.
- [28:51]
Pablo Torre
So explain, explain the psychology here because when you write about it, it did crystallize it for me in a way that I was not previously so clear on.
- [28:58]
Wright Thompson
Well, you know, I mean, one, there is historical context and like peer reviewed research into this. This is not just so. When you find countries that have lost wars, there's often deeply psychosexual stuff that emerges. And so, you know, you have a group of people who, who got their ass kicked in a war and the.
- [29:25]
Pablo Torre
After effects a psychological legacy of that as it regards fear of, of black boys.
- [29:32]
Wright Thompson
They didn't want that, you know, they were scared of. Like the classroom leads to the bedroom.
- [29:38]
Pablo Torre
This is the way you phrase it. The Southern farming class lived in mortal fear of black men doing to them what the planters and overseers had done to Black women for 200 years. The accusation, as it often is in Mississippi, was the confession. None of it's so well talk, talking about like what are the. The physical, concrete objects, monuments that inform how we should see this story? You mentioned that. Of course, the statues, their erection. You mentioned that.
- [30:07]
Wright Thompson
What are they, Pablo?
- [30:08]
Pablo Torre
I mean, I guess it's appropriate that they were erected. All of this being unsubtle, super phallic about just propping up masculinity. Yeah, and I mean that in a very definitional and not liberal arts, clinical way.
- [30:20]
Wright Thompson
No, no, like literally.
- [30:22]
Pablo Torre
I mean actually about propping up the great men that they believe themselves to still be. When were all these Confederate statues erected and why and how?
- [30:32]
Wright Thompson
Give me, let me see the book.
- [30:34]
Pablo Torre
Because it is. This stuff in the historical record can be explained with a materialist understanding. Not to go Howard Zinn on you, but a materialist understanding of like, what are the forces economically, sociologically bearing upon these people?
- [30:55]
Wright Thompson
All right, here we go. The great Mississippi Delta cotton boom lasted 20 years. All the suffering and killing and decay that would follow for the next century were the price of three great years and a dozen good ones. These two decades also marked the peak of the Lost Cause mythology. Consider when all these Confederate statues went up around the state. Consider the history of cotton in the Delta. The land clearing finished around 1900. The price of cotton collapsed for good in 1923 and what happened in between. Port Gibson and Aberdeen. Raised statues in 1900. Macon in 1901, Fayette in 1904, Carrollton and Beulah in Okolona in 1905. Tupelo and Ole Miss in 1906. Brandon and Oxford and West Point in 1907. Cleveland and Lexington and Raymond and Duck Hill in 1908. Greenville and Winona in 1909. Hattiesburg twice and Grenada in 1910. Gulfport and Kosciusko and Quitman and Ripley and Brookville and Heidelberg in 1911. Columbus and Laurel and Meridian and Philadelphia and Vaden in 1912. Greenwood and Sumner in 1913. Greenwood again in 1915. Hazlehurst in 1917, Louisville in 1921. Many of these were placed quite intentionally in the lawn of the local courthouse, sending a message about the law and whom it was designed to protect. Most of the monuments around the state were built during the brief but emotionally powerful cotton boom. Not a single courthouse statue in the state of Mississippi was erected after 1923. The Lost Cause was always about cotton and money.
- [32:51]
Pablo Torre
The cosplay of these are historical monuments as opposed to us performing the theater of our self mythology.
- [33:01]
Wright Thompson
By the way, if these things had gone up in 1866 and they were all about 18 year old boys who died, I might Be a lot more sympathetic.
- [33:09]
Pablo Torre
It's hard to avoid what seems to be the clear rationale, because you don't.
- [33:15]
Wright Thompson
You shouldn't tear down monuments to soldiers, local soldiers who died. But that's not what this is.
- [33:21]
Pablo Torre
That's the point is that this is not about tearing down every bad statue of a person who history now judges poorly in retrospect.
- [33:28]
Wright Thompson
Robert E. Lee didn't want any statues of himself and was really adamant and articulated in the moment what would happen if you build statues of me. Robert E. Lee, they tried to get him to be the first head of the clan. That's how they got to Nathan Bedford Forrest. He was like, nah, I'm good.
- [33:50]
Pablo Torre
Bedford Forrest was waitlisted.
- [33:51]
Wright Thompson
That's right. He was like the backup. You know, he's. But like, they knew. They knew what would happen. You start doing the life expectancy math and you realize that the province in the Confederate army were starting to die almost at the exact moment the Lost Cause mythology was beginning. And like, it almost down to like the year. And so you just realize that this is children trying to have a father whose memory they can live with and cherish and celebrate. And it actually becomes super simple on a certain level. Like, it's the intersectionality. When you start lining up the timelines, it makes your head explode.
- [34:38]
Pablo Torre
And you mentioned that all of that is actually explained by the price of cotton and the body of Emmett Till. That is not in fact, some actor, other corpse.
- [34:50]
Wright Thompson
No, because when he was exhumed In I think 2003 or 2004, because the FBI was trying to reopen the case. So they got Simeon Wright's DNA, his cousin, and they did a DNA test. And of course it was Emmett Till.
- [35:06]
Pablo Torre
And what was the object, the physical object that was hanging around the body of Emmett Till that would be the.
- [35:13]
Wright Thompson
Fan from a cotton gin.
- [35:16]
Pablo Torre
I mean, it's just like, what the are we doing, man?
- [35:18]
Wright Thompson
What? Like, what are we doing?
- [35:34]
Pablo Torre
You're at an event. Deeper into the book with a man who is so essential to. You're reporting Wheeler Parker.
- [35:42]
Wright Thompson
Oh, my God.
- [35:42]
Pablo Torre
The last living witness.
- [35:44]
Wright Thompson
Yeah. Wheeler Parker was Emmett's cousin, best friend, next door neighbor. Rode the train south with him in 1955. Was in the house the night he was kidnapped. They shine the flashlight and pointed the gun in his face first. And he rode the train back to Chicago alone. I don't let nobody try to make me a hero or something great. Because all I did was survive, scared as I could be. No hero. I'm just survived to tell the story. You know. So if nothing else from this book, I hope that it forever cements Wheeler Parker as an essential player in the American story. Next to Eisenhower and Chester Nimitz and Barack Obama, Reverend Parker and his wife Marvell Parker, they run the Till Institute in Chicago. And like if you're looking for something to do with your money, like they're worse things to do than the Till Institute. But like. Anyway, go ahead. You're about to ask about Wheeler.
- [36:45]
Pablo Torre
No, it's just that Wheeler, there's this story that you report about how he's on a college panel.
- [36:53]
Wright Thompson
Yeah.
- [36:53]
Pablo Torre
And. And he's hearing like well intentioned scholars talk about this person that he is the only one left to know.
- [37:00]
Wright Thompson
Yeah.
- [37:01]
Pablo Torre
And, and what does he say?
- [37:03]
Wright Thompson
He's like, all this sounds great, but I must not know the person you're talking about. And like, you know, the Emmett Till industrial complex is real. So many well intentioned people say allegedly whistled, he whistled. And every time somebody well intentioned, very often someone who looks like me says allegedly whistled. For decades, Wheeler, Reverend Parker felt like they were calling him a liar because he was sitting on that porch. People still say allegedly whistled, he whistled. And you know, the horror isn't whether or not he whistled. The horror is that for a 1314 year old boy that whistling is a capital offense because like even if he'd said everything they said he said in the store.
- [37:57]
Pablo Torre
Correct.
- [37:57]
Wright Thompson
But like he didn't. He just whistled. He was just, he was showing off.
- [38:05]
Pablo Torre
The, the social code.
- [38:08]
Wright Thompson
Yeah.
- [38:09]
Pablo Torre
That demanded thou shalt not whistle or.
- [38:12]
Wright Thompson
Make eye contact or not say sir or ma'.
- [38:15]
Pablo Torre
Am.
- [38:15]
Wright Thompson
Correct.
- [38:16]
Pablo Torre
It is worth noting the historical framework for this, which is to say that the Jim Crow south, these laws, these codes were things that the Nazis studied.
- [38:26]
Wright Thompson
No, the Hitler sent a lawyer to the University of Arkansas in the 1930s to figure out how to write the Nuremberg Laws.
- [38:34]
Pablo Torre
It's ridiculous the quantity of facts here.
- [38:38]
Wright Thompson
Well, the first, the first draft was287,000 words and it's running at 107,000.
- [38:45]
Pablo Torre
Yeah, it's, there's, there's, I believe like 31 pages of just like notes on the back.
- [38:49]
Wright Thompson
Well, here's why I am not the first person to write about this case. I will not be the last person. I feel deeply and profoundly part of a chain of people that include.
- [39:01]
Pablo Torre
And that's clear in the book, by.
- [39:02]
Wright Thompson
The way, whether it's Keith Beauchamp or Jerry Mitchell or Dave Tell at the University of Kansas or Devery Anderson, like you want to show your work so that the next person who comes along to write about this case can do two things. One, fix anything I messed up. And more important, strip it for parts. Push the story forward.
- [39:27]
Pablo Torre
It just feels like this story in particular though, is one that can be, and you have proven it to be reportable and worthy of public scrutiny in a way that should actually mitigate, nullify those accusations from others that this all, this is all a two sided debate.
- [39:49]
Wright Thompson
No. And there needs to be a postage stamp of common ground that everyone can stand on. I know it's like not very popular right now to talk about reconciliation, but it is the only hope that we as a tribe of people have. Human beings are tribal. And if you don't give them a tribe, they're going to make one. And the one they're going to make, you're not going to like nearly as much as the one that everybody buys into. And if there is no tribe of Mississippi Daltons, if there is no tribe of Mississippians, if there is no tribe of Southerners, if there is no tribe of Americans, then we don't really have any hope of doing any of the other stuff we want to do. We have to create a tribe of us before we do anything else. And so it feels like, it feels like everyone is in a spasm and we haven't even started to do the work yet.
- [40:40]
Pablo Torre
And so you, as this great grandson of a man who was a co founder of, as you put it, the white collar clan.
- [40:48]
Wright Thompson
Yeah.
- [40:48]
Pablo Torre
In this same place, you wind up in the book at the Till family reunion.
- [40:54]
Wright Thompson
Yeah.
- [40:55]
Pablo Torre
And. And this group, this tribe, they welcome you in. And. And what do you see?
- [41:02]
Wright Thompson
Well, first of all, they know who I am and where I'm from. These are really smart, savvy people who are Mississippians. And so it wasn't like I snowed them. They knew exactly who they had invited. And I just was in this room and I realized that every living person who actually knew Emmett Till was in the room. And it really hammered home yet, like, yeah, man, this is a murder that happened to a, a race of people and a nation of people, but it also happened and continues to happen to a family. There were probably 12 people alive who knew Emmett Till when I started this. There are probably eight or nine left alive, maybe less. I mean, they're dying. Several died during the process. I don't want to claim like ownership of anything. I do want to say that I felt connected to it in that moment and I walked out of there. And so that the fourth act of the book, which is the memory was born because I realized that if you don't tell the story of the people who are fighting today, now you know, Marvell and Wheeler Parker and the Till Institute in Chicago, Patrick Weems and the Emmett Till Interpretive center in the Mississippi Delta, Gloria Dickerson's. And we together creating change in Drew, Mississippi. If you're not telling the story of the people who are still fighting this fight all these years later, then you've just wasted your time and everybody else's time. And also would be a profound act of disrespect. I mean, if you look at the book, it doesn't say Emmett Till anywhere on the COVID I mean, I don't know if this is the right decision. I'd love to hear from people. It was certainly an earnest one. I just felt like I didn't want them to think I was making a billboard about their family member and friend. And I don't know if that was the right decision or the wrong decision or if I'm just making myself feel. I don't know. But I just argued very strongly for us not to do that. And it flowed out of this idea that I was a welcomed guest in a world and inside a tribe of people and wanted to conduct myself then and forever after as a guest would treat a kind, generous host. Because I'll say this, you don't have to get into your own thing. But like, I have struggled mightily for a long time with the idea that there is a God. And, you know, to quote the West Wing, at some point, just stop struggling. And, you know, it just. The whole concept fits so perfectly into my own sort of understanding of how people are controlled, that it just was like it. I just, like this is spending time around Reverend Wheeler. Parker has legitimately, fundamentally upended that because he is so full of grace and love and forgiveness and refuses to hate and carries around so much pain and refuses to blame that honestly, the only explanation I can come up with for that is there has to be a higher power. There has to be a God, because otherwise I don't understand how he is how he is.
- [44:50]
Pablo Torre
There is one part of the book that I think speaks to this, and I'm just going to quote it near the end here because I think it is another articulation of what you're trying to express with me. And you write, quote, as a white Deltan, it is my sense that most black people have been willing to forgive the unforgivable, give all of us a second and third and fourth chance. The issue all along has been our unwillingness to accept it.
- [45:20]
Wright Thompson
I mean, I find that to be deeply, deeply true in a way that people not from here are going to laugh and be like, you idiot. But it just never occurred to me, you know, like this. Exactly. I mean, I sensed it, but it never occurred to me like this. And that, you know, look, we've got to find one tribe of people in which the patron saints are Muddy Waters and Elvis Presley. In which the patron saints are Kiese Lehman and Eudora Welty. In which there is a tribe of us. And as pie in the sky and naive as that sounds, that's the only hope that we have as a people of continuing to exist.
- [46:05]
Pablo Torre
Ray Thompson, author of the Barn the Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi and one of our country's foremost future Avery Bradley Scholars.
- [46:15]
Wright Thompson
Look, I need an Avery Bradley jersey. Is there a Jersey? Do you think I could go get one right now in New York City somewhere?
- [46:22]
Pablo Torre
I believe that there is the worst bootlegger on Canal street who has been waiting for you.
- [46:27]
Wright Thompson
I'm going to show up and Avery Bradley, send me a Jersey. Man, this is.
- [46:31]
Pablo Torre
This is now. This is not pathetic, right? Thompson, thank you for reporting this book.
- [46:36]
Wright Thompson
Thank you so much.
- [46:46]
Pablo Torre
This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out a Meadowlark Media production and I'll talk to you next time.
- [46:56]
Wright Thompson
Sa.