How Emmett Till Got Erased from the History Books, with Wright Thompson

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

We have to create a tribe of us

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This is the best thing you've written.

I mean, it's a weird question, but I sort of agree.

It wasn't even a question.

No, it's.

I just think it's

this book.

The new book, The Barn, is the best thing I've read you write.

This is going to sound crazy.

I feel like everything else I've ever written is prelude and practice to be able to do this right and not f ⁇ it up.

It is reported.

I want people to know about the fact that this is investigative journalism that is cinematic.

And even that word, I'm already catching myself because

it's about.

what really happened in a story that I knew so much less than I realized.

Well, that's what got started for me.

I mean, the Emmett Till murder, which is at the center of this book, and we'll get into all the other things around it, but the Emmett Till murder is one of the most famous murders in American history.

I mean, to me, it's up there with Abraham Lincoln in terms of killings that forever shaped this country.

And so we think we know a lot about it.

Emmett Till's body was found in the Tallahatchie River August 31st, 1955.

A week before, this 14-year-old Chicagoan, vacationing in the Mississippi Delta, had whistled at a white woman, woman, 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant.

On September 6, 1955, two white men were charged with Emmett's murder.

Roy Bryant, husband of Carolyn Bryant, and J.W.

Milam, his half-brother.

But when you really get under the hood, A, you find out that we don't really know that much about it, and we're continually finding things out.

Jerry Mitchell, like the great investigative journalist in Mississippi, found something new after this went to the printing press.

I mean, we're still finding things out.

And then what you find out is that the lack of knowledge isn't just

because of the effects of time.

It is intentional.

It was an erasure that started almost immediately after the murder and continues.

And so the book is uncovering new things about the murder, but also tries to contextualize why it happened, where it happened, and why the erasure happened.

How did you get the idea to do this book?

Where did it start?

I was at home during the pandemic and were you still at ESPN then or no?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, you know, we all got grounded.

I remember.

I had been on the road my whole life and I didn't know what to do.

So I started trying to think of stories I could report.

in archives and things I could do that didn't require getting on airplanes.

So I started a story in which I was going to do the family tree of every member of LeBron James's Los Angeles Lakers.

And so I started.

I mean, I was doing Dwight.

I was doing LeBron.

I got LeBron's family back to Albany, Georgia.

And so I was doing Avery Bradley.

I like how this story begins with Avery Bradley.

First of all, like separate, we should do a whole issue on how Avery Bradley is the most underrated player in NBA history.

I want the story that you're describing, frankly.

I want the genealogy of the Bubble Lakers.

Dude, it was incredible.

and so avery bradley's family is from mount bio which is very close to where i'm from i mean it's eight or ten miles from my family farm it's also very close to the barn that's a whole thing if you don't know the history of mount bio it is an all-black town that was founded by the uh freed former enslaved people who worked for Jefferson Davis's family, the president of the Confederacy.

And they started a town

in Mississippi, and it's still there.

And so Avery Bradley's whole like father's side of his family is from there.

He would go there in the summer.

And so I started Googling around and found that one of the witnesses in the Emmett Till murder and in the trial was a woman named Amanda Bradley.

And so there was a moment where I wondered, is Avery Bradley related to one of the witnesses in the Emmett Till case?

And so I started calling around to Emmett Till scholars.

I don't think that he is.

But in the process of doing that, this guy named Patrick Weems, who runs the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, who's one of the main characters of the book, said to me,

Have you ever been to the barn?

And I said, What barn?

And he just said, We need to take a ride.

What did you know growing up, going to school in Mississippi?

How was it described?

All of this stuff?

Uh, it wasn't.

I mean, I found my old history book and it's not mentioned.

Uh, the Mississippi history book, uh, like stops, I think, like at World War II.

This is so crazy that I had to text somebody I went to high school with and be like,

Am I remembering this right?

Or has this become like urban legend?

No, this is true.

Our eighth-grade American history teacher called the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression.

I mean, this is, you know, we weren't taught any of this.

I didn't know the name Emmett until a New South history class at the University of Missouri.

Didn't know any of it.

And one of the propulsive questions of the book is, like, how is that possible?

And, you know, and I try to answer that in an actual, like, an investigative, sincere way, you know, a mapping of silence and how this is possible.

I mean, the best word to describe it is Omerta.

You call it that in the book, this Omerta between fathers and sons, this thing that, by the way, neither black nor white people seem to enjoy reliving, talking about in the Delta.

No, people don't talk about it.

But like, the project is a deep mapping of the land around the barn where it happened.

Okay, so I just just need to establish here the conventional understanding of what happened to Emmett Till.

Because Wright Thompson's new book, which is also unsparingly personal, as we'll discuss, was the first thing that ever really made me think about the barn.

The barn where Emmett Till was actually murdered.

I had heard about the grocery store, the place where Emmett Till had whistled at 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant back in 1955.

And I had heard about the photos, had actually seen the photos, the famously disturbing pictures of a disfigured Emmett Till in an open casket at his funeral.

The photos that Emmett's mother explicitly wanted America to see.

An all-white jury would acquit Roy Bryant and J.W.

Millum, two men who beat and mutilated and shot Emmett in the head, making sure to sink his body in the nearby Tallahatchie River.

But later, we would learn, Roy Bryant and J.W.

Millum confessed to Look magazine and writer William Bradford Huey that they did it.

It was them.

The two of them had killed this black kid who was just visiting from Chicago, visiting his relatives, and whose death sparked the civil rights movement.

in the process.

Rosa Parks famously said that when she was sitting on that bus and got asked to move she thought about emmett till yes and this is a 14 year old boy who just turned 14 who liked comic books and bo diddley and you know i mean like was was was a little chubby as you write yeah had a stutter had a stutter so by the way

he couldn't have possibly said the things that Carolyn Bryant said he said.

And so Carolyn Bryant, the woman at the center of this, who told a bunch of people that Emmett Till had done a bunch of stuff, which is in question.

There's a screen door.

There's no air conditioning in 1955.

They could, everybody on the porch of that store could hear everything inside that store.

And, you know, one of the things that's interesting is if you get the notes taken by the defense attorneys, you can watch her story change.

And so one of the things that's so interesting is the defense attorneys essentially wrote the famous Look magazine story that was the confession that until, frankly, this book, details from it found their way into every history to the point that the Secretary of the Interior came to Mississippi to investigate making an Emmett and Mamie Till National Memorial and was taken to places and emotionally told stories that were all fiction.

because people are still using details from the Huey account.

So when you go go read this story and then you go find the notes of the lawyers, they're quotes that Huey wrote down from the lawyers that appear in the story in the mouths of the killers.

Right.

Huey being the author of the Log Maga maga magazine.

Huey being the author of the Look magazine story, William Bradford Huey.

And that whole story was written to erase the barn.

J.W.

Milam and Roy Bryant were half-brothers, different fathers, same mother, super inbred.

They had different fathers, but the same grandfathers.

You know.

Noted.

Yeah.

And so it was a whole tribe of brothers, and it was super violent with a history of doing shit like this.

And so they took Emmett that night to Leslie Milam's barn, who was their brother.

That's where it all went down.

And Leslie Milam was never arrested and tried.

So he wasn't protected by double jeopardy.

So when they did the confession, they had to change all of these details to write him out of it.

And so the erasure of the barn is so emblematic of the overall erasure.

You know, Leslie Milam in 1974, his wife, Frances, who was a hairdresser in Cleveland, Mississippi, she called up Macklin Hubble, who was their preacher, the Baptist preacher.

And Macklin in his 90s sat on his deck in Cleveland and told me this story.

He has since passed, but he was alive when I was reporting.

He gets a phone call, and it's Francis saying,

Leslie would like to see you.

And he goes over to the house, and Leslie Milam is laid out, like in his pajamas on the couch in the front room, a bunch of light.

And Leslie confesses to him that he was one of the people who killed Emmett Till.

And

Reverend Macklin

was angry and irritated because it didn't feel sincere.

Felt like he was like trying to lawyer his way to heaven.

Like, if I say this shit now, I'm probably fine.

And

so they prayed together and then the preacher left.

And Leslie Milam didn't make it to morning.

I mean, that was the last day of his life.

He confessed literally on his deathbed.

And, you know, I think he was 57.

All of these guys died young, riddled up with cancer.

There's this beautiful moment where somebody asked Mamie Till,

how do you feel that they got away with murder?

And she said, What are you talking about?

They got the death penalty.

Every one of them died young, painful, and ostracized for what they did to my boy.

From time to time, I've heard rumors of Milam and Brian.

I know that both of them lost two sons each.

Their little sons were about the same age, four down.

And they did not have the pleasure of spending their lives with their sons.

And I do know that they

thought they were heroes, but when their backers backed up and would not support them,

they spent a very miserable life wondering, we are the heroes, and all of a sudden we are nobody.

So I'm sure that they paid.

They're both deceased now, But I am sure that they paid for their error.

But another thing I know.

When you look through the story of how it is that the barn got erased, you mentioned, of course, the famous Look magazine story.

But I also want to put this into larger context because so much of this, part of the reason the degree of difficulty was the way it was, was because actual legal documents,

the murder weapon, all of these artifacts that would reveal the truth,

they disappear.

So like I got a call and talked to a guy who

he and his sister own the murder weapon, which was handed to their father, I think from Sheriff Strider, if I remember correctly.

When I talked to him, he was in a bank and a safety deposit box in Greenwood, Mississippi, just sitting there.

Like the menace of that.

It still fires.

The gun still fires.

The FBI shot it not that long, like 20 years ago.

And I mean, the erasure is staggering.

I mean, what's the other one you just mentioned?

Oh, I mean, just the courthouse missing file.

Oh, the file folder in the courthouse of the most famous trial to ever happen in the courthouse was empty.

If you go to the Ole Miss Library and pull out the Look magazine, it's there, but the story's torn out.

I mean, over and over and over again, you find that this is just not spoken of.

At one point, you get a thumb drive in the mail.

Which is the Carolyn Bryant's unpublished memoir.

So the Carolyn Bryant memoir, just to spell it out here, it fundamentally accuses Emmett Till, recently turned 14-year-old, of being overtly sexually aggressive.

She took the lie to the grave, which is its own kind of crazy.

The FBI agent who

maybe knows more about this than anyone, a guy named Dale Killinger, who's really incredible.

One of the things he said was that the FBI profilers at, I think, Quantico, told him,

look, she's going to be really hard to crack because she's told this lie so many times now that she probably believes it,

which is also interesting, which is the point of erasure and the point of telling your children and grandchildren a lie about who they are and where they come from.

Because if you tell it enough, it becomes true.

I want to get back to just the way in which this whole story, for all of its width, for all of its depth, it is also familiar while also being, for many of the people who will read it, alien.

And it's because when you see how the story of Emmett Till's murder was spun, edited, erased, reframed, resold, monetized over and over again, there are just so many familiar echoes.

The photo, for instance, that got released of Carolyn Bryant as this innocent beauty queen.

The framing of Emmett Till as a man, as a young man, as opposed to a 14-year-old who just turned 14.

And the press operation of Senator Jim Eastland was driving a lot of this.

It was a very sophisticated press operation.

And so like, you know, there are many people who think that it was the senator's press office who leaked the beauty queen picture.

None of it was random.

The allegations, by the way, that actually this whole thing was an NAACP plot.

So communist agitators.

This is all from

present day shit.

So like, if this is real, this is what the jury said happened.

This was the defense's theory of the case that they all bought.

They said

that the NAACP in cahoots with the Communist Party went and got a body out of a Chicago morgue, took it to Mississippi, threw it in the Tallahatchie River.

hoping that someone would find it,

and that that body was thrown there and the whole story of Emmett Till was concocted

and Mamie Till was a communist plant who had been paid off with a phony life insurance policy on her son Emmett who was alive in Chicago or Detroit and all of the and all of the witnesses these sharecroppers who risked their lives and all of them who had to go live in exile They were all communist plants, I guess, like Manchurian candidates.

You know, you're you're going to be a sharecropper for three generations so that we can activate you.

All of this was done to make white Mississippians look bad because the dignity and reputation of white Mississippians was an essential bedrock part of protecting democracy.

That's what they believed happened.

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So much of the book is also stuff that I didn't know about you.

When you write about how your whole early life was surrounded by a fable of lost grandeur and that your family has owned your current farm for more than a century, one day you might even run it.

Your family's always called it a planting company, avoiding, of course, the more famous, infamous term.

A plantation.

You know, my mother says they weren't allowed to use the word plantation growing up.

They didn't get rid of the land, but let's not use the word,

you know.

But I'm flipping to page 213 of your book.

I'm just wondering if you could read this segment that I have sort of like bracketed, just start there,

because it is about

your ancestry, but your genealogy.

As the descendants of liberals and conservatives, of owners of enslaved people and civil rights crusaders, I usually find it slimy to judge them from the moral safety of the future.

It's trendy for Southern writers to find a straw ancestor in their past.

I find that generally disgusting.

But the actions of a few of my family during this terrible year, when faced with an easy, cowardly choice and a hard, brave one, left a terrible stain on our name.

Look, I'll tell you, my great-grandfather, Ellis Wright, who's in this book, I desperately tried to avoid putting him in the book because, like, this is the thing that I'm going to eat shit about, like at the, at Thanksgiving.

And he made it impossible.

He kept inserting himself into the news cycle in 1955.

Oh, it publicly, like, these aren't family stories that I sort of told out of school.

This shit is all on the internet.

The Jackson Citizens Council

founded in 55 was what?

The Jackson Citizens Council is essentially the white-collar Klan.

So instead of direct acts of violence, they would use rhetoric to wind other people up to commit acts of violence, which is not a conspiracy theory.

One of Milam's defense attorneys actually said,

we need men like Milam to fight our wars and keep the N-words in line.

I mean, these are direct quotes.

And so the Citizens Council would wind up people to do their dirty work for them and also just extreme economic coercion.

It's like the Klan and the Chamber of Commerce had a baby.

And so my great-grandfather founded the largest chapter in the state of Mississippi.

And this man, Ellis Wright, is who I'm named after.

I didn't want to write this story if it's just another person telling the story of Emmett Till.

Right.

The idea of this being a serialistic people's history.

That's right.

And the people in this case are your people.

That's

Something that I came to this book with is this question of

why is Wright Thompson the person who should be taking on this with the ambition, aspiration of, I'm going to tell you a story that is criminally, and that is a loaded and accurate word in this context.

100%.

Underreported.

Well, and especially the, it's underreported in,

you know, how everyone arrived in this place on this night.

And, you know, like there are many, many new things in the book.

And it's not because I'm Woodward and Bernstein.

It's because there's so much still to do.

I mean, like, well, two things.

I mean, one,

the idea that, like, these are my people and this world.

You know, my mother is really, really active on Facebook politically.

She and I share a political bent.

What a dangerous description for a parent.

Really, dude.

And, but she, and like, it's scary.

She lives alone and these like right-wing nut jobs.

They're like, am I going to have to go over and like fucking shoot somebody?

You know, and like, it's scary.

And so I asked her one time, I'm like, what do you say?

You win an argument.

Then you've won an argument on the internet and who cares?

And what she said to me and made me realize that I was wrong was that she grew up in the Mississippi Delta, 15 miles from this barn, closer, really.

You know, she was in high school in Shelby, Mississippi during Freedom Summer when there were marches in Shelby and she didn't know anything about it.

The seating of the delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

has political and moral significance.

Far beyond the borders of Mississippi are the halls of this convention.

And she realized that she had been cloistered and that the main instrument of the cloister is silence and that she promised herself when her eyes were open and the veil was lifted, she realized that if I ever have the chance to do it again, I will never be silent.

And so, you know, this is a mapping of many things, but one of the main things it's a mapping of is a mapping of intentional constructed silence and of the world that creates and the people and tribe of people that creates.

Like, it's interesting.

Jeff Andrews, the guy who currently owns the barn, who, let it be said, is lovely and, you know, has a great relationship with the Till family.

A dentist.

He's a dentist and he's like a really, he's a really nice guy.

He understands that the emotional content of this building for other people, but doesn't quite understand what it has to do with him.

His grandparents moved into the area with a government program in the 1930s when the U.S.

government was essentially taking over the farm economy, like a 40 acres and a mule sort of situation.

So he grew up, I mean, his family grew up with an eyeshot of this marn.

He buys it in 1994

and has no idea of its history.

I believe him.

I've known him for years.

And then when he bought it, then his father told him.

Like,

you know, the silence is deeply hardwired.

The self-investigation,

the feeling of I have work to do here.

It feels like, look,

my daughters are going to be Mississippi Delta farmers.

and there's a world in which you know this is a user's manual oh man like an owner's manual for this land and your daughters will read this book and they'll get to the part where you are unsparing about how you yourself view the confederate flag in high school dude i love the confederate flag in high school it just didn't occur to me when you talk about the intentional erasure and the you know mississippi schools didn't integrate until 1970 and then when they integrated there was an immediately a parallel segregated school system that that still exists.

I mean, in many ways,

it's crumbling now.

But it's funny.

The only way it turns out in 2024 for a segregation academy to survive is to integrate,

which I find beautiful and delicious.

But like the War of Northern Aggression, we were taught a very specific story and that teaching worked.

And so one of the things I hope is, look, I really hope that

kids like me in bedroom suburbs of Birmingham and Atlanta and Charlotte and kids in the Mississippi Delta and kids in Alabama and Georgia and Tennessee and Arkansas and Louisiana and Virginia and North Carolina and South Carolina, I hope that they read it and it becomes the Southern Howard Zen.

I don't know the right way to say it.

But it is, what you've constructed here, it's true what you call it.

It's a secret history of how the Mississippi Delta came to be defined by its rich land and poor people.

That's right.

By extreme structured value attached to dirt and a corresponding worthlessness attached to life.

And the thing you realize is that, so one of the first owners of land in Township 22 North Range 4 West was the Delta Pine and Land Company, which was later owned by the Manchester Fine Doublers and Spinners Association.

In England.

Manchester, England.

And so one of the things I didn't realize is that Mississippi was from the invention of the cotton gin until the federal government takeover in the New Deal of the American farming economy in 1933,

Mississippi served as a colony for Manchester, Liverpool, London, and New York.

And, you know, Money Mississippi is famously where Emmett Till whistled.

Yeah, the name actually being...

Money Mississippi.

The Money Planning Company was owned by Charles Merrill of merrill lynch the global river of capital flowed through here because you know 1933 is also when synthetics were really invented in dupont laboratories makers of better things for better living through chemistry

and that name is all over this book all over this book

yeah and until then cotton was oil and mississippi was saudi arabia and so yes and so what's so interesting is mississippi has never been governed for the benefit of its citizens, by the way, any of its citizens.

And the capital required that one group of those citizens turn on another group of those citizens to extract the 10% profit margins that were flowing to everybody.

And then when the global economy moved on, you were left with a caste system that had outlived its justification and its reasons.

And instead of going away, it actually doubled down on itself.

itself.

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So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

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Please print responsibly.

The Carolyn Bryant stuff, even the more sort of zoomed-out notion of why, at the core of this whole story,

you find sex, the threat of it.

Southern men,

no group of people in America have thought more about sex

because, like, all that, that's essentially what segregation is about.

So, explain, explain the psychology here, because when you write about it, it did crystallize it for me in a way that I was not previously so clear on.

Well, you know, I mean, one, there is historical context and like peer-reviewed research into this.

This is not just no, no, no, no, no.

So when you find countries that have lost wars, there's often deeply psychosexual stuff that emerges.

And so, you know, you have a group of people who who got their ass kicked in a war.

And the after effects, the psychological legacy of that as it regards fear of black boys.

They didn't want, you know, they were scared of like the classroom leads to the bedroom.

This is the way you phrase it.

The southern farming class lived in mortal fear of black men doing to them what the planters and overseers had done to black women for 200 years.

The accusation, as it often is in Mississippi, was the confession.

None of it's so.

Well, talking about like what are the physical concrete objects, monuments that inform how we should see this story.

You mentioned that, of course, the statues, their erection.

You mentioned that.

What are they, Pablo?

I mean, I guess it's appropriate that they were erected.

All of this being unsubtle, super phallic about just propping up masculinity.

And I mean that in a very definitional and not liberal arts clinical way.

No, no.

Like literally.

I mean actually about propping up the great men that they believe themselves to still be.

When were all these Confederate statues erected and why and how?

Let me see the book.

Because it is

this stuff in the historical record can be explained with a materialist understanding, not to go Howard's inn on you, but a materialist understanding of like, what are the forces economically,

sociologically bearing upon these people?

All right, here we go.

The great Mississippi Delta cotton boom lasted 20 years.

All All the suffering and killing and decay that would follow for the next century were the price of three great years and a dozen good ones.

These two decades also marked the peak of the lost cause mythology.

Consider when all these Confederate statues went up around the state.

Consider the history of cotton in the Delta.

The land clearing finished around 1900.

The price of cotton collapsed for good in 1923.

And what happened in between?

Port Gibson and Aberdeen raised statues in 1900, Macon in 1901, Fayette in 1904, Carrollton and Beulah and Oklona 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,

Hattisburg twice and Grenada in 1910, Golfport and Cosiesco and Quitman and Ripley and Brookville and Heidelberg in 1911, Columbus and Laurel and Meridian and Philadelphia and Vaden in 1912, Greenwood and Sumner in 1913, Greenwood again in 1915,

Hazlehurst in 1917,

Louisville in 1921.

Many of these were placed quite intentionally in the lawn of the local courthouse, sending a message about the law and whom it was designed to protect.

Most of the the monuments around the state were built during the brief but emotionally powerful cotton boom.

Not a single courthouse statue in the state of Mississippi was erected after 1923.

The lost cause was always about cotton and money.

The cosplay of these are

historical monuments as opposed to us performing the theater of our self-mythology.

By the way, if these things had gone up in 1866 and they were all about 18-year-old boys who died, I might be a lot more sympathetic.

It's hard to avoid what seems to be the clear rationale.

Because you don't, you shouldn't tear down monuments to soldiers, local soldiers who died, but that's not what this is.

That's the point, is that this is not about tearing down every bad statue of a person who history now judges poorly in retrospect.

Robert E.

Lee didn't want any statues of himself and was really adamant and articulated in the moment what would happen if you build statues of me.

Robert E.

Lee, they tried to get him to be the first head of the Klan.

That's how they got to Nathan Bedford Forrest.

He was like, nah, I'm good.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was waitlisted.

That's right.

He was like the backup.

But like, they knew.

They knew what would happen.

You start doing the life expectancy math and you realize that the privates in the Confederate Army were starting to die

almost at the exact moment the lost cause mythology was beginning.

And like it almost down to like the

year.

And so you just realize that this is children trying

to have a father whose memory they can live with and cherish and celebrate.

And it actually becomes super simple on a certain level.

Like it's the intersectionality.

When you start lining up the timelines,

it makes your head explode.

And you mentioned that all of that is actually explained by the price of cotton and the body of Emmett Till.

That is not, in fact,

some actor, other corpse.

No, because when he was exhumed in, I think, 2003 or 2004, because the FBI was trying to reopen the case.

So they got Simeon Wright's DNA, his cousin, and they did a DNA test.

And

of course, it was Emmett Till.

And what was the object, the physical object that was hanging around the body of Emmett Till?

That would be the fan from a cotton gin.

I mean, just like, what the are we doing, man?

What, like, what are we doing?

You're at an event deeper into the book with a man who is so essential to your reporting, Wheeler Parker.

Oh, my God.

The last living witness.

Yeah, Wheeler Parker was Emmett's cousin, best friend, next door neighbor, rode the train south with him in 1955, was in the house the night he was kidnapped.

They shone the flashlight and pointed the gun in his face first.

And he rode the train back to Chicago alone.

I don't let nobody try to make me a hero or

something great because all I did was survive, scared as I could be.

No hero.

I'm just survived to tell the story.

You know, so.

If nothing else from this book, I hope that it forever cements Wheeler Parker as an essential player.

in the American story next to Eisenhower and Chester Nimitz and Barack Obama.

Reverend Parker and his wife, Marvell Parker.

They run the Till Institute in Chicago.

And like, if you're looking for something to do with your money, like they're worse things to do than the Till Institute.

But like,

anyway, go ahead.

You were about to ask about Wheeler.

No, it's just that Wheeler,

there's a story that you report about how he's on a college panel.

Yeah.

And he's hearing like well-intentioned scholars talk about this person that he is the only one left to know.

Yeah.

And and what does he say?

He's like, all this sounds great, but I must not know the person you're talking about.

And like, you know, the Emmett Till Industrial Complex is real.

So many well-intentioned people say allegedly whistled.

He whistled.

And every time somebody well-intentioned,

very often someone who looks like me, says allegedly whistled, for decades, we were, reverend parker felt like they were calling him a liar

because he was sitting on that porch people still say allegedly whistled he whistled

and

i you know the the horror isn't whether or not he whistled the horror is that for a 13 14 year old boy that whistling is a capital offense because like

even if he'd said everything they said he said in the store correct but like he didn't he just whistled he was just

showing off

the

social code that demanded thou shalt not whistle.

Or make eye contact or not say sir or ma'am.

Correct.

It is worth noting the historical framework for this, which is to say that the Jim Crow, these laws, these codes,

were things that the Nazis studied.

No, Hitler sent a lawyer to the University of Arkansas in the 1930s to figure out how to write the Nuremberg laws.

It's ridiculous, the quantity of facts here.

The first draft was 287,000 words and it's running at 107,000.

Yeah,

there's, I believe, like 31 pages of just like notes on the back.

Well, here's why.

I am not the first person to write about this case.

I will not be the last person.

I feel deeply and profoundly part of a chain of people that include...

And that's clear in

whether it's Keith Beauchamp or Jerry Mitchell or Dave Tell at the University of Kansas or Devere Anderson like

you want to show your work so that the next person who comes along

to write about this case can do two things one

fix anything I messed up and more important strip it for parts push the story forward it just feels like this story in particular though is one that can be and you have proven it to be, reportable and worthy of public scrutiny in a way that should actually

mitigate, nullify those accusations from others that this all,

this is all a two-sided debate.

No, and there needs to be a postage stamp of common ground that everyone can stand on.

I know it's like not very popular right now to talk about reconciliation, but it is the only hope that we as a tribe of people have.

Human beings are tribal, and if you don't give them a tribe, they're going to make one.

And the one they're going to make, you're not going to like nearly as much as the one that everybody buys into.

And if there is no tribe of Mississippi Deltans, if there is no tribe of Mississippians, if there is no tribe of Southerners, if there is no tribe of Americans, then we don't really have any hope of doing any of the other stuff we want to do.

We have to create a tribe of us

before we do anything else.

And so so it feels like, it feels like everyone is in a spasm and we haven't even started to do the work yet.

And so you, as this great grandson of a man who was a co-founder of, as you put it, the white collar clan in this same place, you wind up in the book at the Till family reunion.

And this group, this tribe, they welcome you in.

And what do you see?

Well, first of all,

they know who I am and where I'm from.

These are really smart, savvy people who are Mississippians.

And

so it wasn't like I snowed them.

They knew exactly who they had invited.

And

I just was in this room and I realized that every living person who actually knew Emmett Till was in the room.

And it really hammered home that, yeah, like, yeah, man, this is a murder that happened to a race of people and a nation of people, but it also happened

and continues to happen to a family.

There were probably 12 people alive who knew Emmett Till when I started this.

There are probably eight or nine left alive,

maybe less.

I mean, they're dying.

Several died during the process.

I don't want to claim like ownership of anything.

I do want to say that I felt connected to it in that moment.

And I walked out of there.

and so that the fourth act of the book which is the memory

uh was born because i realized that if you don't tell the story of the people who are fighting today

now

you know marvell and wheeler parker and the till institute in chicago uh patrick weems and the till interpretive center in the mississippi delta Gloria Dickerson's and We Together Creating Change in Drew, Mississippi.

If you're not telling the story of the people who are still fighting this fight all these years later, then you've just wasted your time and everybody else's time.

And also would be a profound act of disrespect.

I mean, if you look at the book, it doesn't say Emmett Till anywhere on the cover.

I mean, I don't know if this is the right decision.

I'd love to hear from people.

It was certainly an earnest one.

I just felt like

I didn't want them

to think I was making a billboard about their family member and friend.

And

I don't know if that was the right decision or the wrong decision, or if I'm just making myself feel, I don't know, but like I just argued very strongly for us not to do that.

And it flowed out of this idea that

I was a welcomed guest

in a world and inside a tribe of people and wanted to conduct myself then and forever after

as

a guest would treat a kind, generous host.

Because

I'll say this, you don't have to get into your own thing, but like I

have struggled mightily for a long time with the idea that there is a God.

And, you know, to quote the West Wing, at some point, just stopped struggling.

And, you know, it just, the whole concept fits so perfectly into my own sort of understanding of how people are controlled that it just was like,

I just was like, this is bullshit.

Spending time around Reverend Wheeler Parker has legitimately, fundamentally upended that because he is so full of grace and love and forgiveness and refuses to hate and carries around so much pain and refuses to blame that honestly, the only explanation I can come up with for that is there has to be a higher power.

There has to be a God because otherwise I don't understand

how

he is how he is.

There is one part of the book that I think speaks to this.

And I'm just going to quote it.

uh near the end here because i think it it is

another articulation of what you're trying to express with me.

And you write, quote, as a white Deltan, it is my sense that most black people have been willing to forgive the unforgivable, give all of us a second and third and fourth chance.

The issue all along has been our unwillingness to accept it.

I mean, I find that to be deeply, deeply true.

In a way that

People not from here are going to laugh and be like, you idiot, but it just never occurred to me, you know, like this exactly.

I mean, I sensed it, but it never occurred to me like this.

And that,

you know, look, we've got to find one tribe of people in which the patron saints are Muddy Waters and Elvis Presley, in which the patron saints are KSA Lehman and Eudora Welty,

in which there is a tribe of us.

And as pie in the sky and naive as that sounds, that's the only hope

that

we have as a people of continuing to exist.

Wright Thompson, author of The Barn, The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, and one of our country's foremost future Avery Bradley scholars.

Look, I need an Avery Bradley jersey.

Is there a jersey?

Do you think I could go get one right now in New York City somewhere?

I believe that there is...

the worst bootlegger on Canal Street who has been waiting for you

to show up.

And Avery,

send me a jersey, man.

This is now.

this is now pathetic right thompson

thank you for reporting this book thank you so much

this has been pablo tore finds out a metallark media production

and i'll talk to you next time