Ep. 763: Landscape and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

Summary

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The MeatEater Podcast – Episode 763: Landscape and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

Host: Steven Rinella
Guest: Wright Thompson (Author, Journalist)
Release Date: September 15, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this richly layered conversation, Steven Rinella welcomes celebrated writer Wright Thompson to discuss his new book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. The episode dives deep into the landscape, history, and cultural dynamics of the Mississippi Delta — centering on the infamous 1955 murder of Emmett Till at a barn that still stands today. Through storytelling and rigorous historical context, they explore how places acquire meaning through layers of human history, agriculture, race, economics, and memory, examining not only the Till case but also the broader architecture of American land, labor, and myth-making.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Wright Thompson and His Work

• [02:29] Steven introduces Wright as a renowned sports writer and author who grew up in the Mississippi Delta. Wright’s latest book takes an unconventional look at the Emmett Till murder by closely examining the land where it happened.
• [04:08] Emphasis on the purpose of Wright’s book: not just retelling the murder, but exploring the history of a single patch of ground and its significance.

2. The Power of Place: Interrogating Land and History

• [05:34] Steven and Wright discuss the “deep history” of land—how anyone who is attached to a place (hunters, outdoorspeople, farmers) can uncover layered stories, both tragic and inspiring.
• [07:52] Wright: “Anyone in America who has an attachment to a place…can learn to understand their spot in a deep history sense.”

3. The Emmett Till Murder: Narrative and Consequence

• [14:12 – 22:57] Wright gives a detailed, empathetic account of Emmett Till’s murder:
  • Emmett, a 14-year-old from Chicago, was visiting family in Mississippi.
  • After a brief, misinterpreted interaction with a white woman at a store, he was abducted, tortured, and murdered by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam.
  • The violence was contextualized within post-Brown v. Board racial tension, the collapse of the sharecropping economy, and harsh political rhetoric.
  • [17:21] Notable insight: “Being 14 is about testing boundaries and the dominant culture…was about protecting boundaries and those collided.”
  • The racial violence had lifelong repercussions for those who tried to seek justice, with witnesses and family members forced to flee the state under threat of death.

4. The History of Land, Agriculture, and the Delta

• [26:32 – 48:24] Thompson traces the transformation of the Mississippi Delta from uninhabitable swamp to man-made cotton factory, driven first by timber companies and later by the agricultural boom.
  • The unique American process of parceling land (Land Ordinance of 1785) and how ownership records reveal historical truths (unlike spoken or written narratives, which can lie).
  • The transition from hardwood swamp to cotton monoculture, commodification of the land, outside capital, and the inherent violence and exploitation connected with the cotton economy.
  • [44:46] Wright: “In some ways it went like 200 feet deep. We call that ice cream soil…millions of years of floods. All those natural processes stopped.”

5. Sharecropping and Its Discontents

• [53:06 – 67:45] An in-depth explanation of the sharecropping system:
  • How emancipation forced a labor shift from slavery to sharecropping, itself a deeply exploitative system entwined with credit, land access, and merchant stores owned by plantation owners.
  • [66:42] Wright: “You might sell it for [x]…there’s no way you’re checking my books.”
  • Both black and poor white families were trapped in the system, with the only escape being rare access to credit, often after generations.

6. Class, Race, and Violence: Economics of the Delta

• [59:14 – 63:47] The intersection of race and class, and their role in the violence of the era.
  • Poor whites often had entrenched animosities toward black sharecroppers, manipulated by political and planter class interests.
  • Planners (plantation owners) initially resisted the Klan because it scared away vital labor, showing the complexity of race and class relations.
  • [59:52] Wright: “The Delta was seen…as a safe space from the Klan because landowners weren’t letting that on their land.”

7. When the Land Dries Up: Economic Collapse and the Great Migration

• [84:09 – 87:11] As cotton prices collapsed and mechanization eliminated jobs, black families left the Delta in large-scale migrations for northern cities like Chicago.
  • The murder of Emmett Till became emblematic of a world crumbling under economic and social pressure, with its black population forced into exile.

8. The Curse of the Killers and Community Ostracization

• [32:07; 94:05 – 103:38] After their acquittal, Till’s murderers faced widespread ostracization and various personal tragedies; they became social pariahs in their own community.
  • Ostracism paralleled with high-profile cases like O.J. Simpson, where the verdict was a rejection of the broader system rather than a true exoneration.
  • [96:55] Steven: “They weren’t deciding if they did it or not. It was something different.”
  • [101:41] Wright: “These people were totally ostracized…they couldn’t get crop loans…totally outcast.”

9. The Danger and Complexity of Historical Memory

• [106:37 – 118:21] Critique of how history is erased, sanitized, or weaponized on both local and national levels (e.g., questionable textbook narratives and simplistic historic markers).
  • The imperative, for Wright, is not to learn history for guilt, but for truthful stewardship and understanding.
  • [107:08] Wright: “I don’t feel guilty… but I do think it is incumbent upon me to know what happened on this land if I’m going to farm it.”

10. Landscape as Living Memory

• [119:11 – 121:04] Discussion of how the past remains palpably present in the Delta — that history, geography, and personal and national tragedy are always layered, never quite distant.
  • The past bleeds through: “The places I like best are where the membrane between the present and the past is so thin you can see through it.” – Wright [118:57]

11. “The Barn,” Legacy, and the Responsibility of Memory

• [121:25 – 122:08] The northern migration profoundly connected the Delta to Chicago; the memory of the place lives on in exiled communities.
• [122:10] Wright: “The south side of Chicago is the capital of the Mississippi Delta.”

12. The Lost and Possibly Still-Lost: The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

• [124:04 – 131:25] As a metaphor and real story, the hunt for the presumed-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker is explored — signaling both the loss of the Delta’s wildness and the enduring possibility of mystery.
  • [125:11] The species vanished due to habitat destruction (its last tracts cut during WWII), paralleling cultural and ecological loss.
  • [129:18] Wright: “There are secrets and there are mysteries that, like the deep ocean, remain unknown and almost unimaginable in their wonder and surprise.”

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On history and land:
  “People lie, but the land does not. The land tells the story.”
  – Wright Thompson [23:01]

• On the complexity of the Delta’s transformation:
  “The Mississippi Delta was, as you know, a vast, almost uninhabitable hardwood swamp until around 1900. Then they started clearing it and building sort of the last generation of cotton plantations there.”
  – Wright Thompson [09:00]

• On sharecropping’s trap:
  “The only X in the long variable of an American farm that you have any control over is labor.”
  – Wright Thompson [48:24]

• On ostracism post-acquittal:
  “They were acquitted, but they were cursed, man.”
  – Steven Rinella [32:07]

• On holding dual truths:
  “Being Southern means being able to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time, and some parts of both of them be true.”
  – Wright Thompson [73:37]

• On historical knowledge:
  “I know an incredible amount about the history of this piece of land, but mostly what I know is the sheer tonnage of what I don’t know.”
  – Wright Thompson [117:08]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:29: Wright Thompson introduction and personal history
• 04:08: Why The Barn focuses on one place
• 14:12–22:57: The story of Emmett Till’s murder
• 26:32: The Mississippi Delta’s transformation for agriculture
• 44:46: Topsoil and natural capital of the Delta
• 67:45: Life as a sharecropper and lasting effects
• 84:09: The Great Migration and collapse of the sharecropping system
• 94:05–103:38: The fate and ostracism of the murderers
• 106:37: How the story is retold in modern Mississippi textbooks
• 118:57: “The membrane between the present and the past is so thin you can see through.”
• 124:10: The mystery and metaphor of the ivory-billed woodpecker

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Tone & Language

The episode is candid, reflective, and unflinching. Both Steven and Wright speak with respect, precision, and occasional humor about the weighty themes of violence, memory, race, music, and ecology in the American South. Their language remains conversational and direct, punctuated by moments of poetic insight and personal anecdote.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode of The MeatEater Podcast offers not just a retelling of Emmett Till’s murder, but a powerful meditation on how the American landscape—its farms, rivers, and barns—remembers, shapes, and sometimes defies the stories hammered onto it. Wright Thompson’s deep-dive into the geology of land and memory encourages listeners to see the places they love with new eyes, accepting the full complexity and consequence of what came before.

Transcript

[Steven Rinella]

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[Steven Rinella]

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[Wright Thompson]

Yes sir.

[Steven Rinella]

If you recognize that name you might know him because right as a Senior writer for ESPN.com ESPN the Magazine, worked at all kind of newspapers over the years covering all aspects of sports. He wrote the book Pappyland the Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things that Last. And he wrote the Cost of these Dreams, Sports Stories and Other Serious business. He was the editor for a time in the Best American Sports Writing.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh yeah man.

[Steven Rinella]

I had over the years made it into A handful of the. The best American essays and travel writing and all that kind of stuff. Not essays, travel writing. Never, Never got a nod from the old sports writing.

[Wright Thompson]

Well, that is.

[Steven Rinella]

Now I know who to blame.

[Wright Thompson]

You should definitely blame me. That's a tremendous oversight. Only because, like, my favorite sports writing is outdoors writing.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, I thought they were being prejudiced against us.

[Wright Thompson]

Well, they. They probably were. I edited one version of it. Let's just. Like. Like, I only screwed you once. Got it? So school. Someone else was responsible.

[Steven Rinella]

I'm over it now, man. I'm over it. We're here today to talk about. Well, we're here today to talk about a. A book, but particularly like a. Let me start over explaining this. First off, here's the book we're here to talk about. It's called the Barn. Now, take note of the title. It's called the Barn. The subtitle is. The subtitle is the Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. When I was a little kid growing up, I was aware of. I was aware of the outlines of the murder of Emmett Till in What year?

[Wright Thompson]

In 1955.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. As a kid.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

When I. At the point. When I hit college, I could have told you that Emmett Till was a boy who was murdered in Mississippi for whistling at Cat Calling Something some affront to a white woman.

[Wright Thompson]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

And he was killed. The killers weren't punished. And he. His body turned up in the. In what river?

[Wright Thompson]

Tallahatchie River.

[Steven Rinella]

His body. I knew his body turned up in a river, and I knew it was tied to some piece of heavy equipment.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. To the. A cotton gin fan.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep. I knew that. And this tells that story. But the reason I wanted to have you on and talk to you is I. I want people to understand that story. But I think that it's fascinating to me, and even when I knew you were working on the book and coming out that you were calling the book the Barn, where in the book you take a very unique way of looking at a patch of ground. And I think that this way of looking at a patch of ground is applicable to people's lives who love nature, who love the outdoors, who like to hunt and who like to fish, whatever. People who have a close relationship to the land, which is something I try to encourage you and go and pick a piece of ground. Right.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And ask yourself, not only, like, not only what is the history of this piece of ground, but what are the things that happened that made it be that this piece of ground is now where you find inspiration or whatever Right. Meaning if you have some hunting cabin up north that you would. Or a hunting cabin down south, whatever the hell. Where I'm from in Michigan, like everyone's hunting cabin is for whatever reason is always to the north, just parked. Probably parts of the country where everybody's hunting cabin is east, south, whatever the hell. But for us in the upper Midwest, every. The action is always perceived to be up north.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So you have a hunting cabin up north and by looking at how you handle this piece of ground. And the barn is on a patch of ground and Emmett Till was murdered in a bar.

[Wright Thompson]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Bizarrely, I would never have guessed this is true. Bizarrely, that barn still sits there today.

[Wright Thompson]

I mean it is, it's. It's a guy's barn. I mean, there are Christmas decorations in it. All of his duck hunting gear is in it. The owner of the barn, who I love and gotten to know really well, you know, he duck hunts every day of duck season.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And it's a barn sitting on a piece of land. And I mean, you know this well. But it was a uniquely American idea for the Land ordinance Act of 1785, which is Thomas Jefferson, which essentially dropped a grid over America and divided it into townships and ranges.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And so the barn is in Section 2 of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw meridian. And like the thing that I thought was important is it's a 1300 year history of this square of land. Yeah. And.

[Steven Rinella]

And that, that. Yeah, that is when we get going on this. Like that is one of the things I want to focus on is this idea that, that anyone in America who has an attachment to a place, or maybe it's a place where something horrible happened, like in the case of your book, can learn to understand their spot. Can like learn to understand their spot in a deep history sense.

[Wright Thompson]

That's right.

[Steven Rinella]

Like the, the culturally transactionally, like what are the things that needed to happen? Who are the people that needed to live? What are the actions that needed to occur? That has it be that your favorite spot, you know?

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Like why is it there and why are you there?

[Wright Thompson]

And how did we, how did we get here? I mean, like I have this fantasy that we could do the entire country this way. Like I did one 36 square mile block. I would love it if people would take their own version of that. Whether it's like you said, whether something terrible happened here or whether Is this the 36 square miles where the last cattle drive was in this part of Montana.

[Steven Rinella]

Exactly.

[Wright Thompson]

And now tell me Every single human being who ever went in and out of this square of land and every dollar that that went in and out. I mean, one of my favorite parts of this was I felt like, you know, there are long stretches of nature writing in here because I felt like you had to evoke the world pre civilization. Like, what was this like before people got here? You know, and the Mississippi Delta was, as, you know, you've been down there. I mean, it was a vast, almost uninhabitable hardwood swamp until around 1900. And then they started clearing it and building sort of the last generation of cotton plantations there. And so, like, trying to understand how what should have been a swamp became, you know, a man made cotton factory. I mean, you know, nothing about the Mississippi Delta unless you cross the levee where all those hunting camps are. Nothing about the Mississippi Delta has any of its roots in nature. I mean, this is man made land. And I think that's an important thing to talk about.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I'm struggling like a little bit. The story you tell is so complicated.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah, let's.

[Steven Rinella]

Let's do this, man. If you don't mind.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

First off, give a little. Give a little sn. Like, how'd you get into sports writing?

[Wright Thompson]

So it's funny, I wanted to write about music and I was randomly assigned to the sports section at the college newspaper.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Wright Thompson]

And. But I, I fell in love with it because, you know, there's nothing you can't write about through the prism of sports. And there's something incredible about a locker room because, like, these people have nothing in common except they've won some genetic lottery.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Wright Thompson]

And so I've always found that to be fascinating. And I, I'm most interested in, in tribes and tribalism and how we organize ourselves and how belief systems are handed down from generation to generation, sort of that as the ultimate inheritance. And so much of sports is rooted in sort of how we code our sort of tribal inheritance to hand from generation to generation. And I mean, I think that's also true for hunting and fishing. I mean, the ways in which we pass on the things that are important to us about ourselves that we inherited from our parents or our grandparents, and how do we transfer those to another generation of people? And I feel like hunting and fishing is a huge part of that, you know, in sports, like the, you know, I've always been fascinated by the role, the games we love play in shaping of our identity.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

So, like, I've liked that from the. I've liked that forever, you know, and I've Liked, you know, I started working for ESPN 20 years ago and it's, you know, it's the, you know, it's the greatest job in the world because you just get to sort of follow your obsessions.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

You know.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So you still actively write about sports now and you write about everything for like Kentucky Derby, basketball, football.

[Wright Thompson]

It's just like whatever. It's, it's really lucky because it's just the thing that I'm into at that moment. I mean, I'm doing a thing right now on a tennis star who became a spy, you know, and that's. And like so it's a World War II thriller and so like, it's just whatever you're. I've been very lucky in, in that sense to get to follow obsessions.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. And I imagine you like to pull a cork too. And that's why you wrote about bourbon.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah, man, let me tell you the. That was when you could still have non reimbursable work expenses written off on your taxes before they close that loophole. That was great. I mean, like, you know, I had to write, I finally had to turn the book in because I'd already spent all the advance on whiskey. I was like, well, I can't, you know, there is no money to give back. But that was fun, man. And, and yeah, they, with the tax.

[Steven Rinella]

Code stuff, they really screwed writers because it screwed writers and then now they're handing all that out to people that operate on tip functions. Well, they screwed writers and now they're turned around and basically given the whole, the whole world to tip people.

[Wright Thompson]

Well, and also, why are they so.

[Steven Rinella]

Much more important than writers?

[Wright Thompson]

Well, and also in screwing over writers, they've really screwed over small business owners because the, you spend money on your small business to like, it's an, it's an investment in the idea of the future. And so when you, you know, if I'm doing, if I'm trying to build my, my business, there are legitimate tax write offs that are really important that you just can't do anymore.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And so like there was, you know, there things you, there are things you can't go do on a flyer being like, you know, I think this is, for instance, I think this is a great story. I can't get anybody to bite unless I go spend a little bit of money to go aborted. Yeah. And so, you know, that whole ecosystem was just eliminated almost overnight.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah. No one wants to hear about that except me. We'll have to take that offline.

[Wright Thompson]

No, that's right. But only writer, by the way. Like, there are 11 people right now who are like. Yeah, like, leaning in. That's right.

[Steven Rinella]

They're like, that's true. Yeah. Next thing I want to do.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Just because we're. We're going to step back and go forward, of course. Layout. Layout. I kind of gave a quick outline of the murder of Emmett Till.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But like, is, Is. Is as quickly as is comfortable. Tell the story of the murder of Emmett Till so we can start talking about this barn.

[Wright Thompson]

That's right.

[Steven Rinella]

Like this piece of ground.

[Wright Thompson]

So Emmett Till had just turned 14 years old, and he lived in Chicago, very much a boy. I mean, he still liked comic books. He had just gotten interested in girls. At his 14th birthday party, his mother and her friends overheard him and his friends playing spin the bottle.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Wright Thompson]

And so like, you know, that's in an age where you still like, you know, want to kiss a girl you have a crush on, but also still like comic books. Like, that's such a specific moment of boyhood.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And he went south to visit his family.

[Steven Rinella]

He's from Chicago.

[Wright Thompson]

He's from Chicago. But they were all sort of Mississippi expats. And they were going to take the train down just before the end of summer, before school started. And he was going with his cousin, next door neighbor and best friend. It was a guy named Wheeler Parker. And so this was 1955. This was the year after Brown v. Board of Education, which is only important because the whole south, that's the Supreme Court case that integrated schools. The whole south just ignored it. So the next year they had to do Brown 2. So the Supreme Court had to come in and be like, no, really, we meant it. You have to do this. So that whole summer, everybody was waiting on that Supreme Court decision to come out. Meanwhile, there was a governor's election in Mississippi where they were all sort of. It was a race to the bottom for these votes. And so their whole campaign was about school segregation. So they. These. You should get on newspapers.com and read these speeches these politicians were. Were giving because they just were saying outlandish stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And so Emmett comes south. He doesn't really know any of this is going on. He gets down. He. You have to understand, he's overweight. He has a stutter. The first day he gets there, he goes out to work because they're picking cotton now. And he goes out to work with his cousins and his family. And he makes it about a half day and it's really hot out there. And he gets sent back to the house to help the women. And so, you know, so this is this 13 year old, just turned 14 year old boy who is down with his cousins who is not having a great week. And on that Wednesday they go to a little store in town to go get like ice cream and sodas and things. And so all the boys drive in and he's in the store for a minute alone, but it's a screen door. Later, Carolyn Bryant, who was the woman that he whistled at and her husband and his stepbrother, his half brother are the ones who killed him, she is in there, she said she made up this outlandish story of all the things he said to her. You know, I've effed white women before. One, everyone on the porch could hear every word being said in the store and that never happened. And two, he had a stutter, he couldn't have said it. And so she comes outside and he, you know, I so relate to this remembering being a 14 year old boy. Think he's trying to show off for the older kids. And he whistled at her cat call, whistle. And he looked around and saw in his cousin's eyes real quick.

[Steven Rinella]

Over the years there's been a lot of debate.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

About who said what and how long the exchange was.

[Wright Thompson]

So what actually happened. And a lot of this is well intentioned accidental misinformation because Mamie Till sort of had a certain version of how she thought her son's last days went. The last living eyewitness is a guy named Reverend Wheeler Parker who I just saw down in Mississippi last weekend. And he was standing next to him when he whistled.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And. And Emmett saw the fear in his cousin's eyes and was like, something's wrong. And so they ran. That was on a Wednesday. The thing you have to understand is it was less than 24 hours after the election of that governor's race. I was telling you about where these governors had been. These candidates had been saying outlandish stuff. A lot of talk about bayonets, a lot of talk about violence, a lot of talk about defending your way of life. And you know, most of the voters understood they were just politicians chasing votes.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

But some people heard them and took them serious. And so, you know, in Mississippi especially, there's such a direct link between political rhetoric and violence. I mean, it's not an accident that the day after John F. Kennedy gave his famous civil rights speech, Medgar Evers was shot. I mean those things are, those things are especially Mississippi, always really closely related. So he steps down into this cauldron where the population has been whipped up into a frenzy by months of five people trying to prove they are more segregated than anyone else. And so then there's just a kid in the middle of that. You know, being 14 is about testing boundaries and the, the dominant culture in Mississippi was about protecting boundaries and those.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean this is where, right where you grew up.

[Wright Thompson]

I mean my family farm is 23 miles from the barn. And so, and so they go to town. Emmett and his cousins go to Greenwood for Saturday night to go to the movie. They stopped at a plantation on the way home. At a party, both Wheeler and Emmett had their first ever sips of alcohol. A little sip of moonshine. They didn't like it, but like they're that age. Both of them had their first drink that night, 14 and 16. They rode home. They accidentally hit a dog on the way home and Emmett was begging them to stop the car and go check on the bone, check on the dog. And it was too dark and his cousins wouldn't. And so they drove home in silence while Emmett quietly cried in the backseat of the car over the dog. They went to bed. Two and a half hours later, Roy Bryant and his brother J.W. milam show up at the house, beating on the door, asking to see that boy in Chicago that did the talking. They pointed the gun in Wheeler Parker's face first. He still remembers the staring down the barrel of a, of a not 1911. 45. He was just like the barrels, a lot wider than you think it's going to be. And like he remembered that. He remembered the smell of the whiskey on their breaths, on their breath. They went and got emit Emmett up. He was sleeping with his cousin Simeon Wright. He, Simeon remembered He died probably 10 years ago. But Simeon remembered his whole life how long it took him to get his shoes on because he was scared. They took him out. They drove him around all night. They took him to Roy and JW's brother Leslie's barn. The barn, the barn. They, you know, they tortured him. They pistol whipped him with a.45. And there was a witness named Willie Reed who heard him crying out for his mom. And then they killed him and threw his body in the Tallahatchie river where he would have stayed. You know, I went to the banks one time with a member of his family. Was Sharon Wright. Who's Moses Wright? Moses Wright's niece? Moses Wright is EMT's uncle. That's whose house he was staying in the night he was kidnapped. And I'm standing on the banks of the Tallahatchee river with her. And I just sort was like, what do you think about when you're here? And she's like, I'm just so grateful. And I'm like, what? And she's like, the Tallahatchee river in Mississippi is known by black families as the singing river because there have been so many dead bodies thrown in it. And she looked at there, she looked at me. And he goes, he got out of the river. And, you know, the. They tried to state of Mississippi, saw the body and tried to bury it immediately. There was a whole dug the East East Money Church of God in Christ. They had a preacher, they had Paul Bears. They had the body out there. By the way, the embalmer did an incredible job at the. The black funeral home. His name was Champ Jackson. Champ Jackson's daughter works at the Delta Crown Room in the Memphis airport. She's in there. She's in there right now. See her all the time. And so they. They had him out there. They were going to bury him. They had a hole dug. And then in Chicago, the steelworkers union went to war for Emmett Till. And so they were so. Because the. One of the most powerful guys in the steelworkers union lived in their neighborhood and knew him. And so they got the mayor of Chicago to get the governor of Illinois to get the governor of Mississippi to call the sheriff of lafleur county and stop the burial. And so they put him on a train and took him to Chicago, where his mother insisted on an open casket. And that's how we know the story. I mean, it's really, you know, there. When I started doing this book, there were probably 12 people left alive who knew him. And now they're probably eight. I mean, they've been dying in front of me.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah, you hit it. You hit it right to get to talking to people.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. And so what's so interesting is. And it sort of goes back into the land. And, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to do the book as set as a history of the land, because in Mississippi, people lie, but the land does not. The land tells the story. The land, the history of Mississippi is embedded in those courthouse records and who owned what land and how it moved. And Emmett Till's family, even though they've lived in Chicago for 70 years, feel like Mississippians, like they are definitely people in exile. You know, we grow sweet corn on our farm, and they would always want me to bring them up sweet corn. You know, they want hickory wood from the Mississippi Delta for their smokers. They kept trying to plant magnolia trees in their yard in Chicago, but they just wouldn't. And so there's a real sense of, of people who were disconnected from the, you know, Moses Wright had to leave his farm. There were so many death threats, he couldn't harvest his last crop. The trial was in September. They were already picking cotton. He tried to hang on to get his crop out of the field and couldn't. He had to give away his dogs. There was a newspaper reporter there the day he left, while he was giving his dogs away, weeping. And so, like everybody had to leave in the middle of the night. Willie Reed, the witness, he had to. He got so many death threats that a couple of days after he testified, Moses Wright and Willie Reed were the first black people to go into a court in Mississippi and accuse a white man of murder. And that was 1955. That had never happened before. And so Willie Reed had to walk six miles down a gravel road down the Druder Rule road, which is the road the barn is on, the Druder Rule of a road. If you want to sort of play with the idea that like in like that sort of 100 years of solitude way, the time isn't real. That road was built by Nathan Bedford Forest Brother. So. And Nathan Bedford Forrest, in the winter of 1863 and 64, marched his cavalry down that road past the Doherty bio. So I think in some world where time doesn't exist like we think it does, Those horses and JW Milam's green and white Chevrolet 2 Tone pickup truck pass each other night after night after night after night. And so Willie Reed walked down that road past Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom farm. And it didn't exist yet past where it would be. And there was a car waiting for him at the intersection of the Drude Ruleville road and Highway 8. And the man driving that car was mud gravers. And it was the sort of first civil rights thing he had ever done. And Willie Reed moved to Chicago, changed his name, and he was married to Juliet, who I know I just saw her in Mississippi, was married to her 10 years maybe before she knew that he had some other history. It's like these are people who were forced to leave a place. I'm sure it's a coincidence, but Moses Wright took a job where he cleaned a local theater in Chicago and he went to work every night at the exact same time that the kidnappers had knocked on his door. And he kept a garden. Because he's a country boy, he Hunt. He hunted and he fished. You know, Wheeler Parker told me about his dad one time a tornado hit their house when they still lived in Mississippi. And it ripped the roof off the smokehouse. And it was in the middle of the night in the rain. And his dad had them out there finding bacon and hams and sausages because it had all been thrown all over the field. And he's like, holy shit. You know, we gotta go.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And so, you know, these were people who, for general, like, had real rhythms in a country way of life. Moses Wright liked to hunt, he liked to fish. He liked to make his own sausage with that sage in it. He liked brain and brains and eggs every morning for breakfast. And he lived in concert with the land and then was just sent to a city to move into a housing project. And they let him. The Illinois Central Railroad gave him a patch of land and he did this incredible garden. They made fake mules out of like, wheelbarrow wheels. Wheelbarrow wheels. And they went out and that was the closest he ever felt to home again and is in his garden. And another old man who'd sort of been forced to leave Louisiana did it with him, and that was Fred Hampton's father, the founder of the Black Panthers. So Emmett Till's uncle and Fred Hampton's father worked a garden together in suburban Chicago.

[Steven Rinella]

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[Wright Thompson]

That's oregonhomecarejobs.com.

[Steven Rinella]

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[Wright Thompson]

So what's crazy about it is so the killers sold their story, a confession, to a national magazine because they needed money. And so in the process of doing that, there were a lot more people at the barn that night than just two guys. I mean they were 8 to 10 probably. And so most of those people got away with it. So they had to tell a phony version of the. The confession couldn't be real because they were protected by double jeopardy, but they couldn't. And it was. And it was a family who did it. I mean it's, you know, in that barn that night there were three brothers and a brother in law, you know, and so this is like, this is one family killing. Like it's very tribal.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And so they had to write everybody else out of the story and so they moved everything. And you know, there are a lot of history books that quote from the fictitious account that ran in look magazine. So, you know, Leslie Milam, whose barn it is, Leslie Milam in 1973 called his preacher Macklin Hubble in Cleveland, Mississippi, who I interviewed before he died and said, you know, his wife actually called a preacher and said, Leslie needs to see you, can you come over? And he goes out to this sort of ranch house on a sun baked Dead end street that dead ends into a cotton field on the very outskirts of Cleveland, Mississippi. And there's this guy dying on the front couch of the room. And it's Leslie Milam. And before he dies, he wants to confess to his preacher that he was one of the people who killed him at till. And his preacher listens and they pray together. And the preacher leaves the preacher so shook that he left there and drove out to the store and money just to sort of commune with it. And then Leslie Milam died before the sun came up. And so, like, there were people, you know, Mamie Till got asked late in life, how does it feel that these killers got away with this murder? And she sort of smiled. What do you mean they got the death penalty? You know, they all died young, riddled up with cancer.

[Steven Rinella]

That's the thing I want to touch on later is they got acquitted, but they were cursed, man.

[Wright Thompson]

They were definitely. They were definitely cursed.

[Steven Rinella]

It was kind of like what we talked about before we started recording. Yeah, it's like O.J. simpson.

[Wright Thompson]

Well, just.

[Steven Rinella]

He got acquitted, but he was cursed.

[Wright Thompson]

Well, you know, there's a sense of, like, one of the things that you want to do is excavate the blood and the dirt. You know, like, I've made a real point to follow. You know, if this is a story about memory and erasure within eyesight of the barn, there is the Harvard's Peabody Museum started digging. And it's a Native American city. And the reason it's archaeologically interesting, and this is, you know, right in Township 22 north, right where the barn is. The reason it's so interesting is that. That a whole civilization rose and fell there. And in many ways, it mirrors the sharecropping civilization that would rise up centuries later in the same place almost a thousand years later. But what's interesting to the Harvard and all the other archaeologists who've been digging on this site for years, is there's something there that shouldn't be there. So there's palisade walls, there's battlement architecture, and there were, like, loopholes, arrow loopholes within the walls with, like, interlocking fields of fire. Like somebody was defending themselves here. And all of that, that's all been erased. We don't know who was the aggressor. We don't know who was the defender. We don't know anything about these tribes that live there other than by the time Hernando de Soto rolled along, they were all gone. And so. And this is so on this piece of land, there was A monocrop culture that. Where the elites lived on the hills, on the mound structures inside the gates and then other lived in little cabins sort of out as they worked the land. And it mirrored so completely the. The ecosystem that would rise and fall. I mean, in some ways, 1955, in some ways, the murder of Emmett Till was the death of sharecropping because the first mechanized crop ever planted had been 1943. You want to do something fun? You can lay down these timelines of histories of the research and development, production and then mass production of cotton pickers and the electric guitar. Because it's almost month to month. So as this, as the technology is invented that is pulling the last people out of the Mississippi Delta because you don't need. Because it's become mechanized on a parallel track. The technology is being invented for the music of those people. You can hear an acoustic guitar ring out across a field or in the country, but in a dark loud bar you need electricity. And so you can watch those things develop in tandem. But anyway, I mean, it's. It's fascinating to me to understand that there was on the spot Remtiel was killed, there was an entire civilization that rose and fell. And we say history is going to remember, but that just isn't true. I mean, history almost exclusively forgets. And then in that same square of land, you have Dockery Farms, which is the, you know, the home and birthplace of both the Delta blues and therefore all American music. I mean, all protest music is rooted there. You know, Charlie Patton, who grew up, I mean, almost within eyesight of the barn, was the first real blues star, paramount records, in 1929. He sang first person songs name checking local cops. I mean, this was. I mean, this was protest. This is 10 soldiers and Nixon's coming. This is Fuck you. I won't do what you tell me. This is f the police. This is, you know, it's not an accident that Eazy's grandparents owned a grocery store 16 blocks up Broadway from the house where one of Emmett Till's killers lived. I mean, these are like, you know, Sam Cooke. A change is going to come. Is from the same little town in the Mississippi Delta as Muddy Waters. I'm a man, you know, Nate Dog is from that same little town. So every time you're listening to any G Funk, there is a, like direct line back to Township 22 North Range 4 West. And so, you know, you've got Nathan Bedford Forrest family there. You've got Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm there. There was a Nazi POW camp in between Drew, Mississippi and the barn in the 40s where they were bringing Nazi prisoners to work in the cotton fields. And it's interesting that the, the local people realized that the, they were helping the Nazis soldiers like cheat and teach them how to. Like here's how you weigh down. Like you know how to get, how to get up on the people running it. But some of the Nazi soldiers stayed and married local women and are still there. And you know, they were. The Nazi soldiers were treated a lot better than their sort of the black sharecroppers who were working alongside of them. But, but you know, this was real. I mean there was a whole universe in this square of land. And you know, it's, it would be interesting if you could, we could do this. Like I would love to know the history of the square of land. Like where, like where we are sitting right now.

[Steven Rinella]

Someone needs to do a project where you track every. Like every section or not every section, but every township, every town.

[Wright Thompson]

Someone should do a whole the United States township by township. Because I would love to know some.

[Steven Rinella]

Townships wouldn't have many readers.

[Wright Thompson]

Well, no, but I mean like zone on them too. Let me tell you. I mean like the, there's that Frank and Deborah Popper who are academics.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh yeah, the Buffalo Commons.

[Wright Thompson]

The Buffalo Commons. All right, so I'm way into the Buffalo Commons because if in the, the. This is actually interesting that speaks to this. But like if the wellspring of the American identity is the fact that manifest destiny was achieved and if you look at Frank and Deborah Popper's research that many of the places settled in the mad rush west almost immediately started depopulating. So there are vast stretches of the country now that are technically frontier. And if we didn't actually settle it, what does that suggest? And one of the things is a lot of this book is a mapping. And so I've got this great railroad map that shows around 1900 and it's the railroads coming up from the north, south, west and east. And. And you see them just stop because they haven't connected yet. So this is 20 years after Frederick Turner's essay. This is 20 years after this.

[Steven Rinella]

What rights referring to is there was a. The US government used to define frontier.

[Wright Thompson]

Is a certain number of people per.

[Steven Rinella]

Square mile by population density.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And there was a point at which the frontier officially closed in America.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Because the population density had been met.

[Wright Thompson]

That's right. And so there, and then there was.

[Steven Rinella]

The observation later that all of a sudden it went, it went unremarked upon. But all of a sudden, places kind of went back to frontier.

[Wright Thompson]

That's right.

[Steven Rinella]

Because people would come out, homestead these 40 acre chunks on arid land, but it wouldn't work.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. And so they leave and then.

[Steven Rinella]

And it's. So technically it went back to frontier.

[Wright Thompson]

I mean, and by the way, almost immediately. And so, you know, in 1900, the Mississippi Delta, like I said, was largely uninhabited. Hardwood swamps.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I want to, I want you to jump into that a little bit. Like, so you were talking about Native American history, but kind of explain the Delta as one of the last great wilderness.

[Wright Thompson]

So the. From 1750, somebody listening, who knows more when, from whenever the spinning jenny was invented until the Dupont Laboratory in Wilmington, Delaware in 1933 invented nylon and made petroleum the world's most important commodity. From the spinning jenny to nylon, cotton was the world's most important commodity.

[Steven Rinella]

What's the spinning? You mean the, the thing that seeds out?

[Wright Thompson]

No, but the. No, the 1764, it's the thing that starts to allow mass production so you can turn one worker into 10.

[Steven Rinella]

And what is it?

[Wright Thompson]

And so it's.

[Steven Rinella]

What is the tool?

[Wright Thompson]

It's a weaving situation like a Manchester. You know, it's not an accident that, that during the Civil War in Manchester, the Irish factory workers were raising money for the newly freed enslaved people, and the factory owners were flying Confederate flags above the factories. I mean, it's not an accident like Manchester, Mississippi, functioned for a very long time as a colony of Manchester and Liverpool in London. But anyway. Okay, so.

[Steven Rinella]

Because they were sending cotton.

[Wright Thompson]

They were sending cotton.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

As a side note, it's hilarious in the way that like, you know, the entire Civil War was based on the idea that Europe would force a quick end to the war because no one would want to make war on King Cotton, was the quote. And it's so funny. Like, my family still farms cotton. And the most important thing to know when you're trying to sort of loosely predict what the price of cotton will be is what's the carryover? Like, how many bales of cotton live in the global sort of textile supply chain sitting in warehouses that haven't been brought into the facilities to be turned into stuff. And so the largest carryovers in history to date were 1859 and 1860, which means that no textile mill in the world needed an ounce of American cotton until at least November of 63, at which point. So the entire war was based on a completely faulty economic idea that the. I think they're like the politicians who caught the car. Like they Were just out there saying stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And so, like, one economist could have stopped the whole thing. Just. But guys, you're. You're totally flawed, but so.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, you meaning like that. That.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah, like, this is the cotton market. Like, it was the wrong time to start the war. Yeah. Because they didn't. It was the weakest the south had ever been.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

Which was. It's not unrelated. You only really start wars when you're weak, you know, start them when you're strong. But anyway, like, the Mississippi Delta was the center of the cotton economy for a little while. And then it, you know, it moved around the world like oil does. You know, they're finding oil all over the world. Cotton was like that. And so it moved from Mississippi, Egypt, Brazil, India, Pakistan, Texas. You know, it's all over the world. And then the last place it came back to before King Cotton died forever was back to the Mississippi Delta. Mississippi Delta was mostly hardwood swamps. They quit. The railroad companies were buying huge swaths of land, and the great. The northern woods were running out of wood. And so those timber companies came down to Mississippi. The big plantation adjacent to the barn was owned by a timber company from New York.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh.

[Wright Thompson]

And so, like, these timber companies were coming down. That's why Teddy Roosevelt. That's Teddy Bear. He had been sure. So Teddy Roosevelt spent the night in Township 22, North Range 4 West. And he gave as his gift to the plantation homeowners. It was Taylor and Crate, I think it's right from New York. He gave them two ginkgo trees to plant as his housewarming gift for having him there. And one of those ginkgo trees is still alive. And there's a tire swing in it. And it's out there on the road. See it? Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

There's a tire swing in it.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. People who had the house don't know. It's just behind like a. It's not a trailer. It's like a corrugated tin house. And they have Teddy Roosevelt's ginkgo tree in the backyard. And so. Kidding? No, man.

[Steven Rinella]

The book. I don't remember.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah, that's in there. And so. And so like, the. The land that railroad companies, in concert with the timber companies, they bought all this land, they cleared it, and then to sell lumber.

[Steven Rinella]

To sell lumber and to ship it where?

[Wright Thompson]

North all over like crates. And. And by the way, when Mississippi ran out of hardwood, most of these companies went to Oregon. And there's a reason that their Mississippi town names in Oregon, because they'd sort of, you know, like Schlitz Brewing Co. Bought a timber yard so they could make their kegs. And so anyway, out of hardwood. Out of hardwoods, all hardwoods. And so they were. They were clearing this land. The cotton plantations were almost an afterthought. Like, what are we going to do with this?

[Steven Rinella]

Like, they cleared it for lumber.

[Wright Thompson]

They cleared it for lumber. They're like, what are we going to do with it? And so, you know, they were selling all of this land and this was cotton's last gasp.

[Steven Rinella]

And can you. I remember you had some statistics about that land that, like the depth of the topsoil.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, in some ways it went. It was like. We call that ice cream soil, man. In some ways it went like 200ft deep.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

I mean, incredible soil. I mean, one of the.

[Steven Rinella]

Just all that deposition from the river, just because I remember. I remember being blown away that you could dig down like that and hit.

[Wright Thompson]

Like, alluvial soil and it goes all the way down. And I mean, it's millions of years of floods. One of the things that, you know, millions of years of floods, all of that, all of those natural processes were just stopped. And so the land has sort of been decaying. I mean, the yields are not great in a lot of these places. And so the price of cotton collapsed. In 1919, the price of cotton was a dollar a pound. I think today it's 66 cents. And so maybe 68. And so it was a dollar a pound. It was the last.

[Steven Rinella]

It's lower today by $0.40, even adjusted for inflation.

[Wright Thompson]

No. Yeah, not.

[Steven Rinella]

Not adjusted. I'm saying.

[Wright Thompson]

No, it's 32 cents lower than it was in 1919. Wow. And by the way, if you talk to it like, this is going to be the. This year is going to be so catastrophic for farmers. I mean, our neighbors that are going out of business, like, because the cotton price is being low cotton prices and soybeans. So we grew. Our farm is cotton, soybeans, rice and corn. And china buys all of our soybeans. And this year, they haven't bought a single pod of American soybeans because of all the terrifying. Yeah, all the terrifying. It's just killing American farmers. But anyway, the. They cleared. The price of cotton collapsed in 1923. And then for 10 years they tried to fix it. And then in 1933, the Roosevelt administration took over the American cotton economy. And in some ways, the. It's Franklin Roosevelt. Yeah, Franklin Roosevelt. And so, like, here's the thing I'm going to try to find because, like, I think this, this explains it's the only thing I ever really read, because I think there's something interesting here about how cotton related. How cotton. How the cotton economy put Emmett Till at the exact place at the exact wrong time. And so here we go. I can find this right now.

[Steven Rinella]

No, go ahead.

[Wright Thompson]

I got it. Here we go. The great Mississippi Delta cotton boom lasted 20 years. 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. Those two decades also marked the peak of the Lost Cause mythology. Consider when all these Confederate statues went up around the state, and 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 Okalona 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 in Grenada in 1910, Gulfport and Kosciusko and Quitman and Ripley in Brooksville and Heidelberg in 1911. Columbus and Laurel and Meridian in Philadelphia in 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 on the lawns of local courthouses. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Wow.

[Wright Thompson]

It's all like. The history is all in. It's in the price of cotton. It's in the land. I mean, when you look at the equation of agriculture, even now, you don't control the price of seeds, you don't control the price of equipment, you don't control the price of chemicals. You don't control the weather. You don't control the price of water. You don't control how much water you need. On the other side of the equation, you can't control how much you're selling it for because you can't control the markets. The only X in the long variable of an American farm that you have any control over is labor. And so now you have a system in Mississippi from 1933 where the government is stepping in and taking over the cotton industry. And if it's. If it's. You know, they wrote the agricultural Adjustment act of 1933. And then they had to. It was declared unconstitutional. They had to do it again in either 36 or 38. I forget. But one of the things about that that was so interesting is they were trying to figure out, well, what is a subsidy supposed to do for an American farmer? And the thing that they settled upon was used to be called something called parity payments. And now there's a different structure, but the fundamental ideas are the same. They wanted people to be able to live like they were living in 1919. And so if it ever feels like Mississippi is stuck in the past, it's because, like, statutorily, it literally is. You know, a lot of the American farm bills are designed to sort of recreate that purchasing power. And, you know, the. A thing that happened between, say, 33 and 55 is you have. King Cotton is dying. As mechanization comes in, you have to have a significant amount of capital to be able to buy all this equipment. So it's sort of changing who can even farm. So you have an entire world that is collapsing in on itself, separate from the Supreme Court decisions and, you know, integrating the schools. I mean, you just have an entire way of life collapsing in on itself. Prices are spiraling. 1954, 1955 were terrible crops. And so what you have is. And then you have, you know, black people in Mississippi had no access to the courts, so there was no way for them to do anything if their landlord was cheating them. And so you just created this situation where people were desperate and almost had unchecked power over other human beings. And then Emmett Till decides to go visit his family on vacation.

[Steven Rinella]

Right before I read your book, I read John Barry.

[Wright Thompson]

What's the great rising tide?

[Steven Rinella]

Rising tide.

[Wright Thompson]

I. You know, and by the way, the 1927, the levy broke in Scott, Mississippi. The. It broke exactly at where Delta Pine and Land Plantation is. It was. DPL was one of the first landowners in Township 22 North Range 4 West, which the whole book is about. And it was owned then by the Manchester Fine Doublers and Spinners association, which was the world's largest manufacturing conglomerate that was buying up Mississippi Delta plantations to vertically integrate its supply chain. You know, that company still exists. It has a different name, but they make lingerie for Victoria's Secret and Mark Spencer. I mean, companies all still exist. That plantation was later owned by Monsanto, and it's now owned by Bayer, the Aspen people. And so. But, like, where that. Where the levy broke was at a plantation that was owned by a Manchester manufacturing conglomerate. Yeah, Anyway, sorry I interrupted you.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, no, it's a phenomenal book. Rising Tide.

[Wright Thompson]

I love that book.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, we were gonna have mom, but he canceled at last minute. Or something happened.

[Wright Thompson]

No, his flights got canceled.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, sorry. Flights got canceled. It's a fascinating book.

[Wright Thompson]

It's really good.

[Steven Rinella]

It introduces a thing about between that book and your book. And I want you to explain sharecropping in a minute. Yeah, but it introduces like a. Introduced me anyways to a weird bit in American history. Where from? From Agra. From like the history of agriculture. He explains how there's always been, like you just mentioned, there's always been a labor problem.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

When it comes to cotton production.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Agriculture in general, particularly cotton production. And he lays out this thing that, that the labor problem kind of emerged upon emancipation of the slaves, where for a while the labor problems, you just owned the labor and then all of a sudden they're faced with this. I think that you have to entice. You have to be able to entice willful laborers.

[Wright Thompson]

And the thing that's wild is after the war, all anyone wanted was, can I just have 40 acres where I can protect my family? And so the global capital markets are freaking out about this. You know, you can read the minutes of like, you know, because like the way we have business conferences now in Las Vegas, they had those in Brussels in 1860. I mean, they've been, you know, those aren't new. So you can read the minutes of these like think tank meetings where they're essentially trying to invent sharecropping in real time. Sharecropping was the compromise between labor and capital because they. They tried a couple of different things that didn't work. And so you can watch the global capital markets. And we go into this in the book because it's sort of. You watch the markets coerce people into living in a way that they didn't want to live like people wanted. People just fought a war. People wanted to go. You know, I love that line from that Dire Straits song, Someday you'll return to your valleys and your farms. It makes the hair stand up on my arm, you know, I love that because it, like, it gets at something so existentially true. And people just wanted to go home and live on their land. And there was this brief moment in Township 22, North Range 4 West, all over the south where you had white and black people. You had veterans of the Confederacy and veterans from the Union Army. You had people setting up 40 acre little homesteads and trying to sort of make a go of being what Thomas Jefferson would have called a yeoman farmer. And you watch those people get just chewed up and spit out by the global capital markets who, who had to have these lands in large blocks.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And so, you know, the people who just wanted to go hunt and fish and, you know, grow a little cotton to have a little cash, but have big vegetables with big vegetable gardens with homegrown tomatoes. And, you know, my dad was a small town lawyer and he had a client, it was a drug dealer who would pay him in tomatoes and like, it was the best thing ever, man. All summer we'd eat these homegrown tomatoes and you know, our big meal in the summer was, was dinner in the middle of the day and then like supper was always just like leftovers, but it's usually like bacon and tomato sandwiches in the summer.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And so anyway, they just wanted these huge gardens and wanted to live with their families. And, you know, especially if you're a formerly enslaved person, try to start, you know, roots in your own land were like the most precious thing.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And you just watch the global capital markets make that impossible.

[Steven Rinella]

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[Wright Thompson]

Nope.

[Steven Rinella]

You cover so much that same stuff. It was just weird that I happened to read these two books at the same time because I was like, something that never even occurred to me is like this huge problem of like, how do you get people to work the land and farm when you can't just make them do it well.

[Wright Thompson]

And you know the thing that's there was a huge fight between poor working class white people and white planners and landowners. And so the Delta was seen in large part as a safe space from the clan because like the very paternalistically racist. But like the. The landowners just weren't letting that on their land.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. I mean, they don't want their labor force to be terrorized.

[Wright Thompson]

No. And one of the things that's interesting is the. And even so we'll come back to this, but they used to send trains down at the Mexican border to bring up for picking because they didn't have enough people. One of the reason the hot tamale is like the stereotypical food of the Delta is that it's tamales made with Mississippi Delta ingredients. So instead of masa, it's just staple cornmeal and. And it's pork and like. But anyway, all over the Mississippi Delta, you can buy hot tamales. And that's why, because the black sharecroppers were looking at the hot tamale cans at the end of the road that the folks brought up to help pick. And we're like, that looks better than whatever lunch we got. So they started doing that. But to your point about, like, and about John's book, I mean, that they really nail is that, you know, the planners were trying to fight off the clan. The only spot in the Mississippi Delta. This is wild. The only spot in the Mississippi Delta where there were a big concentration of small, poor white farmers, AKA like prime clan material, was right where the barn is. And it's because the Sunflower Plantation that was owned by the New York timber people, where Teddy Roosevelt spent the night was sold as part of the New Deal. It was broken up into blocks. And so the Roosevelt administration very into sort of progressive era America, very into. We're going to best practices, we're going to find the best farmers to put on this field, these fields and their application processes about understanding, science and all this stuff. And so what you had was the Roosevelt administration kicking off all of the black sharecroppers who had worked the Sunflower Plantation, who wanted to stay there. So they were fighting to kick these people off and replace them with all white farmers from Georgia and Alabama. And the local plantation owners were fighting the Roosevelt administration on behalf of the sharecroppers, basically saying, these people have been here for generations. Like, these are great neighbors. Like, their churches are here, their cemeteries are here. Like, how could you possibly kick these people off? So, like, the other thing that's constantly shaping the Mississippi Delta is like the unintended consequences. And so it's not an accident that Emmett Till is killed in the one square of land where there were lots of poor, angry white people. I mean, there's this. I don't know if you ever read the Robert Palmer book Dealt Deep Blues. No, but what he's talking about, as the price of cotton collapses, this is like 1929, 1930. He says he's talking about the towns growing up in the Delta and taking power away from the plantation owners. They attracted more and more poor whites from the hills who brought to the Delta's paternalistic social structure an atmosphere of barely repressed violence, a burning need to acquire money and power, and an outspoken racism that neatly suited their purposes. They control most of the newer Delta towns economically and politically. The balance of power was shifting. And the PL and the planner class, never numerically strong, could only watch it Shift the delta already tense. Coil tighter and tighter. And so that's a lot of what John's talking about, is that sort of sense of that, you know, Mississippi so often gets looked at and people just look at it through the prism of race, but that's two dimensional. You always have to do race and class because Mississippi there's always been. In a lot of ways, the black population was caught in the middle of a culture war between two halves of the white population, which made it worse for. I mean, like, it's a really. It's the rock and the hard between.

[Steven Rinella]

A battle between rich whites and poor whites.

[Wright Thompson]

Yes. Yeah, very much so. And very much sort of weaponized in that fight with very little regard to what would actually be best for these working families. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Can you explain? I've always. My whole life I've known the term sharecropper, but it wasn't until I read your book and Barry's book, kind of as a pair, you know, a little bit I didn't understand, like, what the hell that, like the economics. Can you explain, like. Like how it came to be and like. And when you hear the word sharecropper, like, what exactly are you talking about?

[Wright Thompson]

So black people had no. Virtually no access to credit markets. So the only way you could get out of poverty was with a crop loan. So the way this would work, say you owned a thousand acres. Now, I can't afford land. So what you will do is you will rent me and my family 25 acres of that.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Wright Thompson]

You sort of needed a family. Every 25 to 40 acres, you would rent me that.

[Steven Rinella]

Like a large landowner would break parcels off 25, 40 acres.

[Wright Thompson]

And that's. I'm.

[Steven Rinella]

And the family gets to move there.

[Wright Thompson]

And, you know, you gets to. I mean, has to.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Wright Thompson]

And so your own houses. And so basically what happened is you would give me what's called the furnish, which would be the money I would need to sort of get going for the year. You would provide the seeds, you would provide the equipment, mules. I would farm the land. I would have a charge account at the local store. What people don't realize is most of these farmers really made their money charging exorbitant interest rates on the stores they all owned. So the plantation owners were also primarily merchants.

[Steven Rinella]

So me as a landowner, like, I own thousands of acres.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I run a store.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Where I sell supplies to me that I. The people that I'm renting that I.

[Wright Thompson]

Have to buy from you.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Wright Thompson]

And you're charging. Charge me 20% interest.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And so. And so you get to the end of the year, and now you have the right to sell my crop. I can't go sell my crop. So I don't know what price you're getting home.

[Steven Rinella]

Who sells the crop?

[Wright Thompson]

So the land owner sells it.

[Steven Rinella]

So I'm the landowner, you're the sharecropper.

[Wright Thompson]

So I plan, I give you the.

[Steven Rinella]

Ground, I give you the seed, I give you a meal, I give you a buy plow.

[Wright Thompson]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

You do the daily labor.

[Wright Thompson]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

And then on your patch grows your cotton.

[Wright Thompson]

And then. And then.

[Steven Rinella]

And then I go. I will now sell your cotton.

[Wright Thompson]

And so you own immediately half of my cotton. That's the deal. You get half, I get half. You sell it. You keep the money from your half. You take the money from my half, you subtract all of the expenses over the years with over the year with 20% interest. And if any money is left, you give that to me.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, but. Because I sell it. But since I own half of it, I'm incentivized to get the best price for it.

[Wright Thompson]

You are, But I don't. I can't check your books.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

So you might sell it for. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

There's no way you're checking my book.

[Wright Thompson]

No, no. And so like, you know, and so like, there's a. There's a gunfight here in this book where a guy came home from World War I and was like, you know, war. Like a war hero, and the. His boss tried to mess him up at settlement time and he just shot him. And, you know, because there. You had no access to the courts.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

But that's the way it works.

[Steven Rinella]

So then, so then at that. Yeah, you harvest.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You harvest. I sell.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I sell for 100.

[Wright Thompson]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

50 is yours.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And I say to you, okay, you bought 30 bucks worth of stuff at my store.

[Wright Thompson]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Interest on the 30 bucks you bought at my store puts it at 50 or $49.

[Wright Thompson]

Here's a dollar.

[Steven Rinella]

Here's a dollar.

[Wright Thompson]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

And that's sharecropper economy.

[Wright Thompson]

That's exactly.

[Steven Rinella]

It wasn't just like. But there was white sharecroppers.

[Wright Thompson]

No. 100% white sharecroppers all over.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Wright Thompson]

And. And especially sort of going Alabama, Georgia. No, I mean, sharecropping wasn't a thing. That only happened. Sharecropping happened to lots of poor people. The only way out of sharecropping was credit markets.

[Steven Rinella]

But let me. I got another sharecrop.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah, Dude, I love.

[Steven Rinella]

So like, like Emmett Till's people had been sharecroppers yes. What would be. What would be a long time that a. That a family would be on a chunk of ground. Like, could you raise your kids all through them being kids?

[Wright Thompson]

Yes. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

No, working that same chunk.

[Wright Thompson]

A lot of people didn't leave. And another thing that's interesting is there are a lot of people who are old who still live on land in the delta that, you know, his two owners away from whoever the last owner they worked for, and people are still living in the house.

[Steven Rinella]

I see. So the sharecropper could outlast the owner.

[Wright Thompson]

Many. Yes. And. And so, like. And if you found one. So, like, Will Dockery, who owned Dockery Farms, which is near the barn, had a reputation of being fair with people. And so, like, you know how. And Wolf worked on Dockery as a sharecropper. Yeah. Pop staples like Mavis Staples. Dad was a sharecropper on Dockery. You had Charlie Patton playing there. The Robert. So the crossroads, the actual crossroads.

[Steven Rinella]

I've been there, man.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. So, like, that's right. That's Dockery. And so, like, we went there.

[Steven Rinella]

I was. I was with my friend.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

She took me there.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

We did all kinds of junk down there the short time we were there. You know what's funny about. Do you mind? No, I love that funny little story is I was with my friend Anna Baker.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I still hang out with. And we were in Memphis. She was going to school in Oxford, Mississippi.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So, like, we were in Memphis, then we were down in Oxford, Mississippi. Then we went to, like, Clarksdale.

[Wright Thompson]

So I'm from Clarkston.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we go there. We went to that bar. Like, Morgan Freeman had a bar.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, yeah. Ground zero. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Went all around there. Went out to that crossroads.

[Wright Thompson]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

And I was like, man, I'm. Get out of the car, you know, and sell. Sell my soul to the devil, you know, she's like, you know, I get out of the car, it took off. It's just like a funny moment, but. And then we had in our head that we were going to go to New Orleans. Okay. And we were going there, and they're like, ah, there's a hurricane coming. We should bail. Katrina. I'm not kidding you, dude. We were, like, going from Clarksdale to New Orleans and backed out because of.

[Wright Thompson]

The weather report, which was 20 years ago last week.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, because of the weather report.

[Wright Thompson]

The.

[Steven Rinella]

One of the things didn't make it. Didn't make it there.

[Wright Thompson]

I love the landscape of the Mississippi Delta. Like, I love, like, I love riding the levee I love being on the other side of the levee. Like, my uncle and I like to like, ride horses back through the old sort of second growth, but cottonwood trees that you could stick your hand into. You know this, like, there's an abandoned. I think Bungie, the grain company, they have an abandoned sort of elevator complex out there where they used to load up barges and you could ride horses through there. And it's like post apocalyptic because it's real industrial, but it's just in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere. And, you know, I love over there. I love being on the Mississippi River. I love the idea of, you know, I love taking my girls out on the Mississippi River. I love, you know, them running up a boat on a sandbar. Like, the idea that, like, my. That they're growing up in concert with that river. And, you know, our farm runs up to the levee. And like, it's interesting because in some ways this is almost like a user's manual for, like, if you be there. But like, I, I love that land and so.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, it shows, man.

[Wright Thompson]

I really. It's. It's really like, I want to be buried in it.

[Steven Rinella]

That's one of the things that drew me to want to talk to you and like, that I liked about your book is I don't, I don't. I try to end the conversation, just wedge us in there. Is that you do a thing that's hard to do, which is like, you love where you're brought up, you love the landscape, you know its history, and you have. And, but. And you're also willing to point out a lot of stuff you guys got wrong. Well, and, And I got. It's funny because I don't mean to, like, this is not just a Mississippi thing, dude, but a couple years ago I went turkey hunting with a. With a new friend of mine down at his place in Mississippi. And walking around with him.

[Wright Thompson]

Is this Taylor? Yeah, Taylor's my dear friend.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He talks very fondly.

[Wright Thompson]

He's a good dude.

[Steven Rinella]

Walking around with him like. Like when I was a kid, if I said the war. Because my dad fought in World War II.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So I was a kid, I said the war. We all meant like. Like the war was World War II.

[Wright Thompson]

That's not what we mean.

[Steven Rinella]

No, but I mean, I was telling Credence the other day, it's not a day goes by he doesn't point to something and be like, before the war, after the war, and everybody, like, he's.

[Wright Thompson]

Talking about the Civil War look like.

[Steven Rinella]

It'S like a defining landscape feature. It'd be like that dam something or another, the war, that bridge something.

[Wright Thompson]

Let me take who owns that land.

[Steven Rinella]

Something or other, the war. And it's just not like in the North. It is not a thing that comes up.

[Wright Thompson]

Well, you know, my. My eighth grade American history teacher, shout out Ms. Holcomb, called it the Civil War, the War of Northern Aggression.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, sure.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. But, like, I guess the thing about, you know, I love the. I love the band that drive by Truckers. And I think, like, Patterson Hood, who writes a lot of their songs, writes his innisf, writes in a really sophisticated, sophisticated way about the South. And the thing he calls it is like the duality of the Southern thing. And so, like, I've really come to believe that the most intrinsic part of having a Southern identity is living at the intersection of the conflict of these things. So if you're somebody who only says, we're the worst, this sucks. This all, you know, we're just, you know, everybody is descendants of oppressors.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, like, like.

[Wright Thompson]

But, like, that's boring as shit. And it's also. You're missing it. And if you only defend it and only say, you know, if you try to diminish the other stuff, you don't actually live there. Living there means living at the intersection of these two. Being Southern means being able to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time, and some parts of both of them be true. And so, like, when I see people who aren't willing to do that, I just find it odd. And, you know, I think it, you know, like, it's not an accident that so many Southerners were in favor of tariffs, which everyone's grandparent would have known what a tariff does to a commodity market. It's where being Southern used to be, about being on the land and living in concert with the seasons and understanding that. And so few people are still connected to the dirt in that way that you have, you know, like, you have people out there living in, like, you know, angry travel ball suburbs, who don't remember anything about what it means to farm, who don't remember what it means to live in concert with the seasons, who don't, you know, who don't move out to the deer camp between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve. You know, you think about, you know, my cousin, second generation president of the Marigold Hunting Club, if you ever get an invitation there. But they have a. They have a communal, like, dining hall. And so people eat meat like Between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve, like, farmers move their families out there. And so, like, I love the parts of Mississippi that are still deeply connected to the rhythms of the land. You know, my Uncle Reeves, who has been on our farm every single day since 1968 when he took it over, loves. You know, it's funny. He managed. He's president of two different big deer clubs. He hasn't shot a deer since 1963. And. And he. He, like, still likes deer club, but he likes the. Yeah, he likes the herd management. They got a PhD from Mississippi State, like, working with what they're planning and when, and he loves that. And then, you know, we've got three or four duck holes on our farm, and he's out there every single day. And a lot of times, doesn't take a gun. Like, it's just calling him in. Just likes to be there and wants to be on. Not land. Wants to be on his land. You know, Wants to be buried in his land.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And, like, that's such a important part to me of what it means to be from Mississippi and to be from the South.

[Steven Rinella]

It's very funny. I have a dear friend of mine, Clay Newcomb, who I work with, too. We always laugh because he has a lot of Arkansas exceptionalism and Southern exceptionalism. So he'll.

[Wright Thompson]

He's over at Stuttgart busting some ducks.

[Steven Rinella]

He'll. He'll say quite freely, he's like, well, in the south, music is very important to us. And I'm like, okay, I didn't realize that it's not. I didn't realize it's not important.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. Wait. Sorry. I didn't realize music was. I didn't realize music wasn't important in Harlem. Music wasn't important in San Francisco. This is Motown thing.

[Steven Rinella]

But there is. Dude. It's, like, legitimate, and it's the thing. I'm gonna get back to sharecrop.

[Wright Thompson]

I giggled. I haven't done that in a really long time.

[Steven Rinella]

Shows, you're having a good time. But I hand it to him is like, he does a lot of interviews with. I mean, his show is largely about Southern culture. He has a lot of interviews, and there's a thing that I got to give them. If you just went and randomly pulled a hundred. Okay, you randomly pulled 100 northerners in a room, and you randomly pulled a hundred Southerners in a room. Okay. And you said, like, what way? I want to know what cardinal direction the front door of your house faces. The Southerners are going to kick the.

[Wright Thompson]

Shit out of the Northerners west.

[Steven Rinella]

If you said, I want to know what is the.

[Wright Thompson]

How could you not know that? Because it's the sun.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, I'm just. Okay. It's just a thing.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

If you took a hundred southerners and 100 northerners and you said, if you take a piss in your yard, tell me the route that piss would take as runoff.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, I could definitely do that.

[Steven Rinella]

And what river, what major river would land in the. Southerners are going to kick the. Out of the north. I don't know why they have this.

[Wright Thompson]

It's because all.

[Steven Rinella]

And they can all out hoop. Oh, they just can't.

[Wright Thompson]

All farming is really. Is getting water onto land and getting water off of it.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

You know, like, one of my favorite things to do is to drive around our farm with my Uncle Reeves because he know his understanding of the drainage. He's like, well, see that culvert goes into the bog file, which is going to flow into Deer Creek. Like, it's unbelievable.

[Steven Rinella]

And so, like, Southerners are better at it. There's just something about. There's something about the southern experience that. Or. Or it's. Everyone had it, but it got. And this is just very general. Like, my friend Doug Duran's like dying right now. He's in Wisconsin. He tell you where every piece.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, it's the guy where you guys go deer hunting on the show.

[Steven Rinella]

He could tell you where every piece of water in the whole state flows to. So there's exceptions. I'm saying, like, like, the knowledge got scrubbed. It's getting scrubbed everywhere. Yeah, the knowledge got scrubbed more in the north. It used to be like, it just got scrubbed more in the north.

[Wright Thompson]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Industrialization came quicker. Whatever. Suburbia came quicker. It got scrubbed in the north fashion that scrubbed the South. So when I look down there, I'm like, like living with. Living with deep history, living with. With landscape, understanding the limitations of land. It just feels more alive.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

In the South. And reading your book, I'm like, this is. You know, and looking at your book, I'm like, this is the kind of thing that I wish there was more of is people being like, the history where you live and what goes on and connecting it to how much topsoil you got, how much rain you got, what kind of trees grew, where you.

[Wright Thompson]

Got, you know, and it's just this.

[Steven Rinella]

Story just gives like, this story gives this like, super dramatic, nationally known travesty a way to go. Like, okay, let's. Let's do this at a place, but we're gonna do this at a place that changed America.

[Wright Thompson]

Well, and. And this idea that, like, that the. That the rainfall and the cotton or soybean yields have a direct impact on violence.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And that, like, bad crops ain't good. No. And like, you go back and read narrative, like enslaved people's narratives, and they're Talking about in 1850, knowing. Needing to know what the Liverpool price of cotton was because that was going to determine how violent their day was. Like, this is the moods of people. It's been tied to that forever. And I mean, you know, the ways in. I mean, we said this earlier, but the ways in which Mississippi, you know, functioned as an extension of man. My mother grew up in Shelby, Mississippi, and they got the Manchester Guardian delivered to their house to track cotton, to track to textile industries in cotton because there was no Internet. And even though the paper came once a week, it gave her father just a little more info. And so there's always been, you know, Yazoo City, Mississippi, used to be named Manchester, Mississippi. My uncle Will was the team doctor for Manchester Academy football team forever. And it's named after Manchester, you know, and I mean, like, their shit.

[Steven Rinella]

Was that tied?

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah, it was so tied into, you know, in New Orleans, all those banks. Those are all London banks. New Orleans and New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah were sort of outpost of European capital markets, you know, and it's just like all of that stuff is fascinating. You know, one of the. There are a lot of these histories of America that I feel like are fatally flawed because they stop at the water's edge as if, you know, as if. Like this, like you can watch capital markets move all of this. And one of the heartbreaking things in the book, there are probably five or six different times. The reason I like the Ivory Bill woodpecker in here is because it represents the mystery to me and it represents the sort of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it's raining flowers in Macondo. Sort of active imagination of what could have happened nine different times. This whole thing could have been avoided. And so, like rolling through the history of the land, you see over and over times where a decision, like one decision, and none of this would have even ever been there.

[Steven Rinella]

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[Wright Thompson]

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[Steven Rinella]

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[Wright Thompson]

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[Steven Rinella]

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[Wright Thompson]

So claim your free welcome bonus now and live the chumba life.

[Steven Rinella]

Visit chumbacasino.com no purchase necessary vgw group void where prohibited by law 21 + terms and conditions apply. When we finish, I want to talk about two things. I want to hear about the Ivory Billed Woodpecker.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I want to hear about the Curse of the Killers. But I want to step right now back to something we left off. Why, like Emmett Till's people.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah, he.

[Steven Rinella]

His people had been sharecroppers from Mississippi.

[Wright Thompson]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Why were they up. Why were they going to Chicago? Like, like what was going on in the. In the economy and on the land that made it that these long time people that had been slaves then they had been sharecroppers. They gave up on the South. Like what was happening.

[Wright Thompson]

So a couple of things are going on. One, factories are desperate for workers. They're sending northern fact northern factories. They're sending like labor agents down to the South.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Wright Thompson]

Who are big recruiters. Recruiters who are being run out of town by the police.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, you're me. Really? There's like a tension.

[Wright Thompson]

No, no, dude, they were like arresting and running them out of town and like. No, it was a huge tension because.

[Steven Rinella]

They'Re taking the labor.

[Wright Thompson]

They're taking the labor. There was. It had gotten. After the price of cotton collapsed. I think an already tense situation, like the book said, coil tighter and tighter. People were looking to leave. There was so much violence. The modern Klan was founded in what, 1922, I think in response to black soldiers coming home from World War I. You know, there was a whole sort of America first after the horror of going to Europe and fighting this war. And so there just was a real retrenchment in the 1920s. And so you had, you know, there were black veterans being killed all over the South. And so, like, people were trying to get out. And so Mamie Till's father moved in, like, 1923, I think.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Wright Thompson]

Because he was like, he didn't feel like he had daughters, and he didn't feel like he could protect his daughters. And he was like, we got to get out of here.

[Steven Rinella]

So it was like. Like moving for safety 22 years before his boy would be killed.

[Wright Thompson]

Yes. He was moving for safety or whatever.

[Steven Rinella]

The hell number years.

[Wright Thompson]

And it was moving for safety.

[Steven Rinella]

Grandson be killed. Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And it was also like, you know, the first mechanized cotton crop in America was 1943 in Clarksdale at Hobson Plantation. I mean, that was coming. And so, you know, our farm, we probably needed in 1950, 400 families living on it to farm it. We farm it now with, I think, 18 people. And that's because the tractors can't turn themselves around. I bet we're 10 years away from farming it with four people. And so you can just watch sort of the need for all of this labor run out. One of the sort of ironies of Emmett Till's murder is that it was very much an effort by a sort of class and race of people to protect what they felt was a world running through their hands. So many families left the Mississippi Delta after 1955. Every family who lived in Money Mississippi, every black family who had a teenage son left. And so the people who couldn't afford the expensive equipment were the only people who were still using sharecroppers. And then the last of the sharecroppers left. And I think by 1965, there were no sharecroppers left in America.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it. Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

So it was.

[Steven Rinella]

So the whole opportunity was evaporating.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. And so he. You also have. He arrived at the last gasp of a way of being in the world and didn't know it.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. You know what kind of broke my heart in a weird way is I always have and. And do hold up World War II guys on a pedestal.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Emmett Till's murders, man. World War II guys. And it was like a service pistol.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. He. They beat him to death with his. With his Ithaca 45. And yeah, these guys, like, a number.

[Steven Rinella]

Of those guys were veterans.

[Wright Thompson]

Well, and they were all veterans. And I mean, one of the guy was a veteran from Peleliu, and then JW Milam was wounded at the Colmar Pocket. One of the things in the book is so all of the. All of his. Every book ever written about Emmett Till. Has a sort of huge line of mistakes through it. Because there was like a typo in JW Milam's obituary, and it got the number of his unit wrong. So people in these books would be describing the battles he would have been in, but he wasn't there. And so one of you know, there's.

[Steven Rinella]

A thing like that. It's so crazy. I don't want to get it. There's a thing like that in the history of the American Buffalo.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

There's a thing that you can't read a book about that subject that doesn't include a thing that never happened.

[Wright Thompson]

Dude. See this.

[Steven Rinella]

Because of a mistake.

[Wright Thompson]

See, it makes. And so. So this way.

[Steven Rinella]

And it's in every book.

[Wright Thompson]

So then you'll love this. So I was like, this doesn't. I just didn't believe it. I think, like, if you're going to write something that is like this, you have to. There's a reason it's so endnoted. You got to show your work.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

And I was like, so I'm not taking anything for granted. And so I found. I found every obituary that had ever been published that mentioned this unit, because I didn't know it was a typo yet. And so I just believed it. I just. So I found every. Every single obituary that mentioned that. And then I call the eldest son of every one of those dead veterans and said. Or emailed or called and said, hey, did your dad bring home anything from the war? And this really nice guy outside of Fort Worth, Texas, was like, my dad was like the logistics officer for that unit, and he brought home a copy of every single piece of paper. They're in my filing cabinets. You want to come see them? So I went and spent a couple of days at this guy's house, and I went through every piece of paper from this unit, and J.W. milam's name wasn't on any of it. And so then I went to these incredible. There's this guy named Eric who works in the archives in St. Louis. So in 1973, there was a terrible fire in St. Louis at the American Archives, and it burned up almost every single World War II veterans personnel file. They're all gone. They all burned the unit files with, like, the morning reports. All of that is still there. So you can recreate someone's service record, but it's unbelievably tedious. And so I eventually recreated his entire service record. And then I went to France, and then I walked the battlefields, you know, like, walk through the forest where the foxholes were wrote all of this, and then cut it all out of the book. So. But, yeah, but I. But I spent a lot of time with JW Milam's. You know, JW Milam, legitimate, You know, people claimed he won a Silver Star. I don't think that's true, but definitely wounded in the Colmar Pocket, like, right there on the border.

[Steven Rinella]

Where was that?

[Wright Thompson]

It's like, I nodded, like I knew, but, no, it's right on the border between Germany and France. Okay, so like, Strasbourg, like, when I. When I went there, I flew into Stuttgart in Germany and drove across the border.

[Steven Rinella]

I see.

[Wright Thompson]

As opposed. That was the closest airport.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So you really tracked these guys down.

[Wright Thompson]

I did. You know, and I had a whole Peleliu thing on Melvin Campbell. And, like, it's just when a legitimate war hero thinks that it is necessary to torture and kill a child to preserve something that he feels is being lost, like, you know, I say in every book talk, like, yeah, forces had a lot to do with him until his death, but forces didn't kill him. Everybody in that barn that night had free will. But what's so interesting is you watch these people move across the South. You know, my family sort of moving roughly the same places generation by generation that the Milams are like. You know, the Milam family was married at one point in the Dupont family, you know, and so you watch them generation by generation, poor lifespans get shorter, not longer. You were watching a family keep going west to try to try again with the next generation failing, generation after generation continuing to move west until there's nowhere left to move west. And so the generation that sort of washed up and there was nowhere left to go was like, JW and Roy's parents generation. And so they were in the hills, they had their noses pressed up against the glass of the last great gold rush in the cotton industry. And they didn't get down into the delta until right after it collapsed. And so for generations, they've been trying to get into this place where this land was. And they get there, and then the promise of it is all gone. And, you know, four generations of Milo men either killed someone violently or were killed violently. And you just watch. You're just watching a family disintegrate. And Emmett Till, with his hope and with his young teenage sense of adventure and of boundary stretching and of looking for the line, he, you know, he intersected. He was on the way up, and he intersected with a group of people who had been augering in for generations. And, like, that has something to do with all of this. You know, I mean, it's like you just forget, like, you know, there's a storage unit in Chicago right now that the Till family has that has Emmett Till's toy train in it.

[Steven Rinella]

No kidding.

[Wright Thompson]

I mean, you know, I mean, like, this was a child who ran into a family that was. Had been so disillusioned by whatever they had been sold about the possibility of where they lived that it had curdled into something terrible.

[Steven Rinella]

Corinne and I were having a conversation yesterday in. In preparation for you coming, and somehow, like many conversations, I'm in. Came around at oj. Look, I got a weird, I don't know, man.

[Wright Thompson]

I met O.J. once.

[Steven Rinella]

I know. It's a great story. Yeah, you should talk about your quick OJ story. And I'm going to talk about the conversation we were having about you that turned into a conversation about oj, which I'm going to turn into a conversation about the acquittal. But go ahead.

[Wright Thompson]

It's perfect. The. And then I'm going to riff off of the acquittal and turn it back to oj. All right. No. The.

[Steven Rinella]

You don't know what point I'm going to make.

[Wright Thompson]

Did you put LSD in this coffee? Nope. The. And so I was at a Kentucky Derby, and I asked. I ran into O.J. at a like, 6am Cocktail party. And, uh, because the horses were training, and I asked him who was going to win, and he said, lawyer Ron, because he said he had lots of positive experiences with lawyers. And then I obviously went and took a shower. Like, Jesus Christ. I was just like, you decapitated somebody. I got to get away from you, man.

[Steven Rinella]

So.

[Wright Thompson]

Allegedly.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. The gloves don't fit.

[Wright Thompson]

No. You must have quit.

[Steven Rinella]

Corinne and I were conversing about. I was telling her she was sweating, that she hadn't finished her book.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, come on.

[Steven Rinella]

And I'm like, I read the whole damn thing, so we're covered. Anyways, I was explaining to her a little bit about the curse.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And I was saying that one of the surprising aspects. And I'm gonna bring this around to OJ to cut you loose. One of the surprising aspects, when these people's community, these murderers, you know, they're judged by their peers, they're tried in their home area. The attitude of the jurors is we're going to acquit you, but I don't want nothing to do with you from here on out.

[Wright Thompson]

Very much so.

[Steven Rinella]

And with the. With OJ's jury, they weren't they weren't considering whether he did it or not. You know, it was like. It was about the lapd.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And it was kind of like, we're gonna let you go. Right.

[Wright Thompson]

Because these guys are totally. Even though you did it, they're also the worst.

[Steven Rinella]

We know you did it. Like, we know you did it. We're gonna let you go. You're not a good person. But this isn't even about you.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

This is about. At the lapd.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So, like, you're. Guilt or not guilt. Like, you know, that's not.

[Wright Thompson]

That's not what's on trial here.

[Steven Rinella]

But this is not what I'm talking about.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Piece of garbage.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But this is not what I'm talking about. That, that kind of. That was so surprising that, like, the, the, the jury, the jurors that acquit them have a like, tacit acknowledgment you did it, and that's bad, but we're not going to participate in this system somehow. Or like, maybe you could explain it better, but, like, they weren't deciding if they did it or not. It was something different.

[Wright Thompson]

So one of the things that's so interesting is in the. The sort of white establishment, you know, the, the. The defense attorneys who are all very, very well educated. You know, a couple of Princeton guys and Chris, not a Princeton person.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, What'd you do at Princeton? Politics. Huh? Your whole four year degree. You ever told me that?

[Wright Thompson]

She likes to say I went to school in Boston. Middle East. That was my.

[Steven Rinella]

You went to college at Princeton. Maybe I knew that and forgot it.

[Wright Thompson]

What a proud. I don't really talk about it too much.

[Steven Rinella]

Rich guy over here.

[Wright Thompson]

What are we going to do?

[Steven Rinella]

That's not the case.

[Wright Thompson]

Jesus Christ.

[Steven Rinella]

Big rich guy over here.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. Their financial aid package. What's your name? Like Van Cocklehorse iv. What are you, like, Schneider? Oh, the knight. My dad's from Brooklyn and my mom is from Beijing. Oh. Oh, so they. So you don't. There's not some big, like, she didn't.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, inherit the position at Prince?

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, okay. I didn't know if there was like a, you know, a Schneider Industrial Challenger sitting out here at that. At the Jet Center. Oh, yeah, not that Schneider. Oh, yeah, the.

[Steven Rinella]

We're a family of Taylor, Schneider, John Thurston.

[Wright Thompson]

No, that's right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. She actually owns all of this. You just don't know it. She really liked you. She's the investor. There's a series of shots, shell companies. So you'll never find out.

[Steven Rinella]

I think I. It's coming back to me now.

[Wright Thompson]

I think I knew that anyways, so. But like the lawyers, I think of.

[Steven Rinella]

Her as the lady that makes earrings out of claws and pecker bones and whatnot.

[Wright Thompson]

Where did you guys meet?

[Steven Rinella]

Right here, but at a different building. Oh, same. Same space, different building.

[Wright Thompson]

The. So, you know, one of the things that the defense lawyers clearly understood was that they were going to use this case. I mean, they talked about this openly. Like all of their record. You can go read now all the stuff. They talk openly amongst each other that, like, we're going to use this murder as our shocking act of violence to try to maintain some control. That because of these court rulings, we're losing. So, you know, like J.W.

[Steven Rinella]

Miles, they wanted to tie it into desegregation, yet very segregation.

[Wright Thompson]

So they shaped the dude. When you read. Go read the look magazine story, that's all phony. They make JW Milam sound like he's Plato. Do you what I mean? Like. Like Aristotle. He's the most sophisticated. Like, there's a newspaper reporter I won't name. But I'm always convinced this guy makes stories up because every time he quotes a cab driver, I'm like, dude, I've had a lot of cab drivers. I've never had a cab driver. Like, who says the exact perfect eloquent philosophical thing I need at the. Like, you're. That just didn't happen. So. But the lawyers are making up these quotes that are coming out of JW Milam. And the way you realize it is when you. At Ohio State, they have a huge tranche of some of these notes and the lawyer.

[Steven Rinella]

But I can't move on. Who's the writer?

[Wright Thompson]

I can't tell you.

[Steven Rinella]

Is he alive?

[Wright Thompson]

Yes. I'll tell you later.

[Steven Rinella]

There's a funny quote that someone was saying that stand up comedians, stand up comedy is mostly acting outraged by something official. You said that you made up that a fake friend said, by the way, this.

[Wright Thompson]

By the way, that's really good. Like, there is no stand up without the straw man.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, I got to say, you make up a friend, you make up a thing he said, and then that thing pisses you off. And you talk about that.

[Wright Thompson]

That's right. Or it's like, yeah, or like, you know the great Louis CK bit about every someone else on the airplane being pissed about the WI Fi. Give it a minute. It's got to go to space. And you're like, when I heard that, I'm like, oh, he's clearly both in this scenario. He's both the person having a temper tantrum and also the other version of him who is self aware enough to know that, like. So, anyway, the. But maybe. No. Anyway, I love.

[Steven Rinella]

So you're not gonna tell me the writer?

[Wright Thompson]

No. And so I filibustered that. And so the. But you. You see things that are coming out of JW Milam's mouth that are verbatim from notes that the writer took from interviews with the lawyers. And so you're watching the lawyers shape it. And so one of them, one of the lawyers said, we need people like JW Milam to fight our wars and to keep people in line. And so there was very much a sense of, like, we're going to. It's exactly what you said. Like, we're going to circle the wagons. But, like, these people were totally ostracized. I mean, at the end of his life, which people? The murderers.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

At the end of Roy Bryant's life, the people the.

[Steven Rinella]

The families that the. The people that acquit him, like, they didn't want them around.

[Wright Thompson]

No. And they couldn't get crop loans, and they couldn't. You know, Leslie Mallom became a drug dealer, and J.W. malam was arrested for food stamp fraud. And, like, that was one of the.

[Steven Rinella]

Biggest ironies, I think, is that if you'd asked. If you went and asked people, you'd be like, you know, if you said, like, hey, give me the. Give me your, like, prejudice views on what, like, minorities are up to.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, oh, food stamp fraud, drug dealing, and the dudes that killed Emmett Till. Food stamp fraud, drug dealing.

[Wright Thompson]

So. So, I mean, I don't know how it is here, but, like, especially in Mississippi, the accusation is always the confession. Like, people only get mad at other people.

[Steven Rinella]

I read that quote, and I told that quote my wife, and then I had to try to explain it to her because you did a better job explaining that the accusation is the confession.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. Like, you only ever despise in other people what you actually despise in yourself. I mean, that's just sort of like. I mean, that's almost universally true. And so, like, you have. Yeah, these guys are bootleggers. They're making whiskey. J.W. milam is one of the main bootleg runners for the sheriff who's investigating his murder. I mean, there's a whole theory of the case that Sheriff Strider made sure to claim jurisdiction because the body was found in Tallahatchie county. The kidnapping happened in lafleur County. The murder happened in Sunflower county. And the. But the case was tried in Tahatchi county because it was the most conservative. And it's also where the killers were from. A bunch of the members of the jury were, like, related to them. This is very much. This is not a random act of violence. This is one tribe, members of one tribe of people killing a child of another tribe of people to send a message.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

You know, and like. You know, and like, the grand conspiracy of what. So when. When the FBI wanted to reopen the case in 2004, 03 04, they had to exhume the body. And so the reason they had to exhume Emmett Till's body was because the jury had said that that wasn't Emmett Till that they had pulled out of the river. So what the defense's theory of the case that the jury bought was that the naacp, in cahoots with the Communist Party, had gotten a body out of a morgue, thrown it in the Mississippi in the Tallahatchee river, weighted it down just enough, you know, obviously understanding the deep science of your body releasing decomp gases so they would know exactly how much weight to have so that it would sink but then float again. You know, somebody really done some work and that this body. And then Mamie Till had said it was her son in exchange for getting a payout of a life insurance policy, and that Emmett Till was alive and that all of this had been done to make Mississippi look bad and to help the Communist Party take over America. And that was the case that the jurors made. That was the case the lawyers made, and that was what the jury bought. So they had to exhume him and do a DNA test to make sure that the body in Baroque Cemetery in Chicago was Emmett Till. I mean, and of course it was. And, you know, so the. And then, like, I'm gonna find this thing real quick because, like, you talk. This is what is being taught about. This is from a textbook that's being taught right now in the Mississippi Delta about the Emmett Till murder. I mean, you talk about the accusations. Always a confession only sort of. Only a state that has so actively rewritten history to such a degree would be worried that someone else was going to come along and do it the other way. So, like, you know, Mississippi has been banning textbooks forever and rewriting text. Like, my Mississippi history textbook stopped before the civil rights movement. So this is. What is. This is from a textbook. And this is the only thing in the textbook that is about Emmentel and This is. This is being taught right now. In 1955, J.P. coleman, the attorney General from Choctaw county, was elected governor of Mississippi and was elected governor in Mississippi's first general election. After the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Coleman promised to keep the school segregated. He proved to be a moderating force during a very difficult time. Just after the election, Emmett Till, a young black man from Chicago, allegedly made. Allegedly made a pass at a white woman in a rural store. Two men kidnapped him, beat him, killed him and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. The coverage of the trial and acquittal of his accused murderers, who later admitted their guilt in an article in a national magazine, painted a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens. That's the textbook. And so, like.

[Steven Rinella]

What about that? Like. Like, help me understand.

[Wright Thompson]

So the thing for me is that the entire murder is still taught in the context of the death of a. The worst part about a death of a child is a poor image. Or is that it sure made the. The sure made the white people look bad. And like, you know, I think like somewhere along the line, learning our history was transformed into sort of relentlessly attacking people with it. And I think, like, you shouldn't be using. You shouldn't learn the history of the Mississippi Delta to determine who is currently politically problematic, who should be canceled. You should learn the history just to know it. And so, like, I don't feel guilty. Like, I don't. I don't have some weird, like, Southern guilt thing, but I do think it's incumbent upon me to know what happened on this land if I'm going to farm it. And, you know, and I do think that it is essential to be able to say, this is what happened here. And, you know, it's not like, you know, we're still on the land. You know, it's not like I haven't. I failed to understand how learning the history of this in any way negatively affects me. I mean, I've thought about that a lot because that's. So that, you know, that conversation is in the air so much and like, I just failed to understand how teaching this history in a school could do a single thing to me or anyone related to me. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

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[Wright Thompson]

You can make a difference in someone's life, including your own, with a job in home care.

[Steven Rinella]

These jobs offer flexible schedules, health care.

[Wright Thompson]

Retirement options and free training.

[Steven Rinella]

They also provide paid time off and opportunities for overtime.

[Wright Thompson]

Visit oregonhomecarejobs.com to learn more and apply. That's oregonhomecarejobs.com.

[Steven Rinella]

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[Wright Thompson]

Sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary VGW group Void where prohibited by law CTNC's 21 + what kind of opposition to your work have you encountered or, or threats or people trying to undermine it? Not really because you know, there is that one, I'm from there and like there's the, there's that great. I think it's Willy Ray Wiley. Ray Hubbard wrote it, but like Robert o' Keane does the sort of version, I know he's like, I may not wear a Stetson, but I'm willing to bet, son, that I'm as big a Texan as you are. Like, I sort of feel like we've been, I've been there from a long, we've been there a long time. We're going to be there a long time. I can kind of say whatever the hell I want. There's a sense of also it's just true and like the people who are from there know it, you know, and, and, and are much more nuanced about this than our two dimensional politicians would lead you to believe. Like, you know, like Mississippi is Mississippi and Mississippians are complicated and, and so there've been very little pushback. And you know, it's interesting because I mean, I love the Mississippi Delta. I didn't know hardly any of this. I certainly didn't understand, you know, the Paul Simon song that's just, it's not the highway through the cradle of the Civil War, but I don't think I knew that until this. I mean there's just a lot about the actual history of the land in the way that both, you know, I think Faulkner is so often misunderstood. I think if you go read the Bear, you go read. Go down Moses, you go down Read Abs. You go read Absalom. Absalom. I think one of, if not the most animating things in all of his work is the bewilderment at the Mississippi Delta. Going from uninhabited swamp to a agricultural factory in 25 years. I mean, it would have taken 1,000 years in Bavaria to kill a forest that big. And I think, like, the idea of civilization as the enemy of nature and how that flows through Faulkner's work. I mean, like, when I read the Bear, when I go read, like I said, go down Moses or Absalom, I feel like Faulkner's read now only through the prism of race. And I actually think that's not. I think you have to read Faulkner through the prism of his deep bewilderment at the sort of existential loss and trauma of having that much wilderness just erased and, like, what that does to a people. Like, I mean, it's not an accident that, like, nothing about the land where Emmett Till was killed has anything to do with God. Like, this is not. This is man made land. This is not. None of this bears the fingerprint of the Creator.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it. And so wholly overridden.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. It just has nothing to do with what. And so, you know, if you ever go out to that barn and wonder, like, God, did God forsake this place? Maybe the answer is yes.

[Steven Rinella]

History, man. Like, I get what you're saying. And history's. History's so tough. And the telling of it so tough. The other day, I took my kids. We were in New Mexico for a wedding.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And I took my kids to Bandelier.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. The site of old Ancestral Puebloan settlements. There's a big sign. You get up in this high overlook and you can see Los Alamos Laboratories off to the west. Okay? And there's a sign there, and it's a National Park Service sign. And the sign is about. The sign is exclusively about that Puebloan people weren't allowed to go on the Los Alamos land starting in 1943 or whatever the hell it was, okay? And the freedom to go there still hasn't been restored. I said to my kids, like, I called them over. I said, man, I want you to understand what this sign is, and I want you to understand what's not here.

[Wright Thompson]

Well.

[Steven Rinella]

And I'm like, that's crazy.

[Wright Thompson]

Well, wouldn't you want to not be on a site where we test nuclear weapons?

[Steven Rinella]

I said, if I was going to write this sign, you call my kids in here and ask. I said, If I was going to write this sign, I would say, and it's worth pointing out the. The thing they invented on that site over there saved probably 250,000American lives because we would have had to have invaded the mainland of Japan. You know, so I'm like. There's just. I was. I was like, kind of lecturing them. I'm like, there's just always more to the story.

[Wright Thompson]

And also, like, if you don't want someone to drop an atomic bomb on you, maybe don't attack them. Because, like, there's a certain degree of don't start shit. Won't be no shit.

[Steven Rinella]

I know. And it's like, like, once you become. But like, like, the point being, once you become aware, like, you did, like, you got obsessed.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And you. You attempt in your book. You attempt your book to do. To unravel every little bit. We're trying to, like, whoa, who's this guy that happened to walk by one day? I'm gon family back a hundred years.

[Wright Thompson]

There's a sense that we're trying to turn our descriptions of American history into tweets, and it's too complicated for a sign over. You can't do in a sign the interplay between the Pueblo people and the atomic bomb or. I got deep into the history. I didn't realize that the Choctaw and the Chickasaw, that the Chickasaw were sort of deeply intermarried into the British, and the Choctaw were deeply intermarried into the French. And so that the. The last free band of Natchez Indians in Mississippi was sold into slavery by the Choctaw and the French and were sent down to work the plantations in Haiti. And a French military officer there ran into, years later, one of those last Natchez chiefs, and he was down in the harbor and whatever the town, it's Cap Haitian now, I can't remember what the name was then and was sort of like, what are you doing? And he was just staring longingly up at home. And so, like, you know, if you're going to tell the history of, you know, if you're going to tell the history of the native settlements in the Mississippi Delta, you have to talk about, like, you know, tribes were being erased by other tribes. Tribes were being erased by the French, tribes were being erased by the British, The Choctaw and the. The Choctaw and the Chickasaw sort of picked. There were a bunch of powers down there, and Nobody picked the U.S. and so they sort of, you know, like, you understand, like, they're these warring factions. And, like, when you get into the history, it is so complicated. And, you know, all of the Indian mounds in Mississippi, I didn't realize this. They elites built their houses on top of them as a way to sort of, like, symbolically stand on the shoulders of the ancestors.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

So, you know, it's like. It's like if your last name is Whitney or something, you know, it's the same kind of idea. And it just occurred to me, researching all this history, how little history we actually know.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

Like, I don't, like, go back to the. The native town right there. I don't know. We don't know who the good guys and the bad guys were. You know, we preserve these mound structures, but we don't know what the people who are living in the houses on top of those mounds were doing to those working folks sort of out in the cornfields. And like, so I just. I know an incredible amount about the history of this piece of land, but, like, mostly what I know is, like, the sheer tonnage of a. What I don't know. And some of it I just. Probably not a good enough reporter to find, but a lot of it is just unknowable. And so I found that to be like. I think with history, I don't think we need some, like, sort of weird judgy sign. I just think we need to know everything we can possibly know about a square of land, because the truth of it is going to be so much more complex than we realize. The truth of it will never fit into sort of one ideological side's version of this. I mean, you know, this. The book sort of goes after tenets of a bunch of the truth is not helpful to ideology.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, a little thing that hit me reading it.

[Wright Thompson]

Does that make sense at all?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

The earlier I mentioned my friend. My friend Doug Dern.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Who lives, like, on his family's farm.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He lives a very deep history existence where it seems like the pat. Like when you're hanging out with them, it seems like the past is all happening right now.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, I love that.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you follow me? Like, like every. Like little, like, trees and whatever. It's all, like, it's all. It's all compressed.

[Wright Thompson]

Well, I love the idea that, like, the places I like best or the membrane between the present and the past is so thin you can see through. And so, like, I feel like there's a version of the Mississippi Delta where this is all happening at once.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Wright Thompson]

And it's all happening right now. And, you know, Nathan Bedford Forrest Cavalry is walking the same road as JW Milam's driving as Willie Reed is walking as. You know, if you ever listen to Crossroads, go see my friend Willie Brown. Willie Brown lived right by the barn. And so, like. Like, I think there's a way in which all of this is happening all the time, over and over simultaneously.

[Steven Rinella]

He. There's this thing Doug, when you. When you're getting the local tour, there's this thing Doug does that like. Like, has reminiscent of Emmett Till in that you go by this farm and Doug's like, so in the past, because in his father's time, some kids stole some gas.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Some ag gas from a farmer. The farmer comes running out, and the kids jump in the car and take off. And the farmer takes a shotgun and shoots one of the kids right in the back of the head. High school kids.

[Wright Thompson]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

He gets acquitted. He thought it was birdshot, is the argument. Yeah, he thought it was bird shot, not buckshot or slug or whatever the hell. He killed the kid.

[Wright Thompson]

The idea that a sophisticated hunter doesn't know what's.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, that's just, like. That's just ridiculous.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah, that's ridiculous.

[Steven Rinella]

And, like, it's just funny. A way of looking at, you know, history. And it has all these same things, like. Like when it was logged and who cleared it. But it's like in his. When you're out with Doug. Yeah. It's like that kid's driving down the road right now. You know what I'm saying? I love that kind of. I like that kind of experience. And that's so much. What I got from your book is this way of just taking chunks of ground and really getting them.

[Wright Thompson]

So I made a map of everything that had happened. It's on my phone. Of everything that had happened in this square of land. And it's interesting because the map doesn't show sort of gradations based on chronology. It's just all there. So you're sort of dry. I can drive around and look at the stuff. And it's like. And I also made a map just like that of the south side of Chicago. And so, like.

[Steven Rinella]

And that's where my dad was brought up.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, yeah. I mean, like, it is my firm, but. Well, first of all, the south side of Chicago is the capital of the Mississippi Delta. Like, the only professional sports team in the state of Mississippi are the Chicago White Sox. You know, in Chicago, until they started dying big Mississippi high schools would have their reunions in Chicago, like Greenwood High School, Greenville High School. Because so Many people had moved Chicago. It was easier for the six people still in Mississippi to go up there than for all 400 to come back. And so like, you know, Mississippi functioned as a, you know, Argo Summit, Illinois, where Emmett Till's family settled. They all worked at the Argo starch plant. They make Argo corn starch.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, I know that brand. Yeah, they make, they still make it.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. And they Karo syrup make your pecan pie with. And they all live there. And they called it Little Mississippi. Like there were so many Mississippians. And so, you know, I feel like, I mean, one of the things I love to do is drive people from the delta around the south side of Chicago, like Hyde park sort of south. And like, you know, because it's mile after mile after mile after mile of perfectly manicured middle class bungalows. And I'm like, you know, and if you drive to the Mississippi Delta, it's super decayed. Mississippi Delta is like, it's like Dorian Gray, you know, it wears its sins on the outside and they're just abandoned buildings and collapsed cotton gins and feels like a failed experiment, which is what it was. I mean, the global capital markets came here, stripped out their 10% and then moved on and left the rest of us there to clean up the mess. And you get this sense that, like, that, you know, that, that all of that money that's on the south side of Chicago should still be in the Mississippi Delta. Like all of those, like that's what it should look like. You know, I don't ever. My accent gets pegged all the time on the south side of Chicago is from Mississippi. People just hear it. They'll know and know and like, or if you're in Chicago and you ever have to give your driver's license either at a hotel or like at a will call, like, you know, if you go to a baseball game, almost inevitably the person working will look at it and see that it's Mississippi driver's license and say something that happens to me more in Chicago than it doesn't. I mean like the, you know, they're.

[Steven Rinella]

The connection is that strong.

[Wright Thompson]

And then the other thing that's interesting is so many people are retiring back to the South. So in the same way that there are lots of southern foods in Chicago, they're now like polishes and hot Italian beef places in the Mississippi Delta because people are coming back home and they're bringing the food of their old home with them.

[Steven Rinella]

As a last thing.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Before we wrap up, can you hit me with the what's your take on ivory build woodpeckers. We've covered that bird good.

[Wright Thompson]

All right, so you.

[Steven Rinella]

We remember. We saw that one.

[Wright Thompson]

We did.

[Steven Rinella]

We got to handle one. It's dead.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, yeah. So the law. Well, one of the things that's crazy is like they had a little foot.

[Steven Rinella]

Tag on them all dried out in that drawer. Remember that Cornell University, the.

[Wright Thompson]

That's right. So the, There's a huge fight, as you know, between the, the scientist at Cornell and then those folks down in, in Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, who claim to have seen one. Yeah, there's the guy.

[Steven Rinella]

Because what they're always. Yeah, what they're always. What they're looking at is, is pileated.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Woodpeckers.

[Wright Thompson]

And there's, that's the argument. And then there's a double. Like there's a. There, there's the double knock. Is that the. There's something about the call that specifically to the ivory build versus the pileated woodpecker. Anyway, I went out for a couple of days in the, in the swamps. It's all around the Stennis space station. And what's interesting is that, you know, we didn't do.

[Steven Rinella]

Just to recap, people, there's a bird that ivory billed woodpecker, went extinct in the 50s.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah. Well.

[Steven Rinella]

And now that they knew where the last one was and it was in a nest and they cut its tree down.

[Wright Thompson]

Here we go. In April 1944, a human being made the last confirmed sighting of an ivory bill woodpecker. The fight to save them had failed. The last large hardwood patch in the lower Mississippi Valley was 80,000 acres in Louisiana called the Singer Tract, named after the sewing machine company that owned it. There were four nests in John's bio and a confirmed roost tree in Mac's bio. The company leased the land to the state as a hunting refuge, but sold the timber rights to a big lumber firm out of Chicago. When the war began, Chicago Mill and lumber, World War I or World War II, I mean, signed a contract with the military to deliver wood. It began cutting immediately. The National Audubon Society went to work to save the woodpecker habitat, lining up state and national support, even getting the War Department to agree to accept less wood in exchange for saving the bird. The company cut it all down anyway. The company executive who answered all of these pleas responded by saying, we are just money grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folk, with ethical considerations. So many animals had vanished from these river hardwood swamps. The red wolf, the cougar, the Carolina parakeet. And now the saws had come for the lord God bird itself, the ivory billed woodpecker. The wood got turned into military packing crates and plywood gasoline tanks for fighter planes. The Audubon Society sent a researcher back into the vanishing forest to see if any birds remained. He found one. The researcher told a colleague who was also an artist that if he ever wanted to draw an ivory bill from a living bird, the time was now. Don Eckleberry, just 23, went south to the swamps. He searched and followed and looked for specific nests and trees. Walking through a swamp while looking up is a learned skill. One evening around dusk, his barred owl sang in anticipation of a nighttime kill. Eckleberry and his traveling companions heard the double knock. They silently waited. Thirteen minutes later, the bird swooped through the clearing, flying above the broken tree corpses left by the lumberman. Eckleberry notated the details in his journal. He stared at the last known ivory bill woodpecker and would never forget its face. Hysterical pale eyes, he wrote, and so also the lumber. The family that cut down those forests is the family that founded and nurtured and invented Aspen. So, like, people who love their wilderness don't give a about yours, huh? You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. And like, oh, man, really? Yeah. And so like, it's infuriated me, like, you come down, you're going to cut down my wilderness and then go somewhere else and preserve wilderness and act for your vacation spot. That's right. I mean, that's hearty. Fuck you to them. Sorry, Phil. All good. I don't do the TV edits. This is somebody else's problem. Trying to look out for them. Yeah, it's fine.

[Steven Rinella]

I like how clay beeps out when someone says, like, gosh darn, Clay will beep it out. He's so opposed.

[Wright Thompson]

You know, it'd be really funny if you beeped out stuff that wasn't cursing and make it look like somebody is just.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that'd be a great trick to do on somebody.

[Wright Thompson]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Just make. Yeah. His mom be like, you should be ashamed of yourself.

[Wright Thompson]

My mom's always like. Because my mom listens to all of these and she's always, you need to leave the locker room. Talk in the locker room.

[Steven Rinella]

So do you think there's still ivory billed woodpeckers around? If you had to guess. And I'm talking the kind of guess where there's a gun to your head.

[Wright Thompson]

Gun to my head gun.

[Steven Rinella]

And here's what I like. The latest kind of thing out. There's an omniscient Being that knows all truth. This omniscient being has a pistol.

[Wright Thompson]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

It says, I know the omniscient being. I know that if there are or are not, I'm going to ask you the question. If you get it right, you live. If you get it wrong, you die.

[Wright Thompson]

Okay, this is a fun game.

[Steven Rinella]

And then I go, what's that line.

[Wright Thompson]

From the West Wing? If the Oscars were like that, I'd watch.

[Steven Rinella]

And I say to you then. I say to you then. So there's no being cute. There's no being like what you wish was true. There's no being cute. There's no devil's advocate. It's just pure you live or die.

[Wright Thompson]

Here's what I think.

[Steven Rinella]

And I say, are there ivy built woodpeckers live Right. Now, my answer is no. All right, if with the gun to my head.

[Wright Thompson]

All right, So I will say this. My answer is not going to be no. Although I am hesitant to offer a wilderness hot take in the corporate headquarters of meat eater with Mr. Meat Eater. So I don't want. I feel like you probably know more about this than I do. I say that I think there is no. And here's why. And here's why.

[Steven Rinella]

No. I hope you're right.

[Wright Thompson]

No. No.

[Steven Rinella]

So now the omniscient being is like, geez, maybe I'm wrong.

[Wright Thompson]

No. So here are the two reasons that I. That here's why I think that I think. One, I think that there is a tremendous desire from sort of the ornithology establishment for it to not be true. And so something about the argument against it feels a little bit to me like the lady doth protest too much. There's something about how aggressive they're being that makes me think that they're operating from a place of weakness, not confidence. Okay, that's good. And then the other thing I think is that I think, you know, I love to watch your show. And one of the reasons is because I like to watch you guys move through a universe the scale of which is so unimaginable to me, like, where you're sort of glassing over three valleys and just thinking, like, there's so much we don't know about what goes on in the wilderness that, like, I tend to think that, like, whatever we think we know, I feel like will be proven wrong. I just think they're mysteries that you know. And maybe I'm just romanticizing the idea of wilderness, but, like, I just think they are secrets and they're mysteries that, like the deep ocean, remain unknown. And almost unimaginable in their sort of wonder and surprise. That would be my argument.

[Steven Rinella]

Great. I'm gonna holster my pistol. Well, I'm not the omniscient being.

[Wright Thompson]

Oh, yeah. I was about to say, by the way, the moment you fake shot me was the moment you actually, your inner narcissism revealed that, like in this story, you're the omniscient being. So I'm glad. I'm like, I'm like, wait a minute.

[Steven Rinella]

I don't know how I got into that.

[Wright Thompson]

I'm like, wait a minute. I'm like, yeah, he just shot. Oh, shit. Stephen is the omniscient being.

[Steven Rinella]

I know. I somehow got. I somehow got into the role. I didn't want the role. No, but I did. There I was.

[Wright Thompson]

If, ladies and gentlemen, if nominated, I will.

[Steven Rinella]

That's right, get your brain. If you want to stretch your brain out real good, like a real good brain stretching, Pick up the barn. The secret history of a murder in Mississippi by a man who. Who was born and raised 20 miles down the road from that murder. It's a landscape history. It's American culture, it's politics, it's agriculture. It's everything, man. It's everything. It's the whole everything squeezed beautifully and elegantly in. Into a single book. Wright Thompson, thank you very much for coming on. Man.

[Wright Thompson]

Man, thanks so much for having me.

[Steven Rinella]

Appreciate it. Thanks. Foreign.

[Wright Thompson]

Fox one is now live.

[Steven Rinella]

It's the new way to stream all.

[Wright Thompson]

Your Fox favorites all in one place. That means NFL Sundays and college football games. Breaking news with the Fox voices you trust and your favorite show streamed as they happen. So nothing gets spoiled with Fox one. You get it all live. Edge of your seat plays.

[Steven Rinella]

Jaw dropping moments and that feeling like.

[Wright Thompson]

You'Re right there in the action.

[Steven Rinella]

Start your seven day trial today.

[Wright Thompson]

Offers are subject to change.

[Steven Rinella]

Go to Fox one for complete terms and conditions.

[Wright Thompson]

Fox one we live for life streaming now.

[Steven Rinella]

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[Wright Thompson]

Why is this taking so long?

[Steven Rinella]

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