Wright Thompson in Conversation with Susan Glisson – Spartanburg, SC

Monday, September 30th at 6 pm, meet us at the Bookshop for an event with Wright Thompson who will be in conversation with Susan Glisson covering Thompson’s new book The Barn: The Secret History of a Mississippi Murder. The Barn is a shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long.

We would love to know you are coming! Please consider RSVP-ing to this free event.

Get a 10% discount on the book when you purchase a copy on Eventbrite.

About the Book:

Wright Thompson’s family farm in Mississippi is 23 miles from the site of one of the most notorious and consequential killings in American history, yet he had to leave the state for college before he learned the first thing about it. To this day, fundamental truths about the crime are widely unknown, including where it took place and how many people were involved. This is no accident: the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing.

In August 1955, two men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were charged with the torture and murder of the 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. After their inevitable acquittal in a mockery of justice, they gave a false confession to a journalist, which was misleading about where the long night of hell took place and who was involved. In fact, Wright Thompson reveals, at least eight people can be placed at the scene, which was inside the barn of one of the killers, on a plot of land within the six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, fabled in the Delta of myth as the birthplace of the blues on nearby Dockery Plantation.

Even in the context of the racist caste regime of the time, the four-hour torture and murder of a Black boy barely in his teens for whistling at a young white woman was acutely depraved; Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to keep the casket open seared the crime indelibly into American consciousness. Wright Thompson has a deep understanding of this story—the world of the families of both Emmett Till and his killers, and all the forces that aligned to place them together on that spot on the map. As he shows, the full horror of the crime was its inevitability, and how much about it we still need to understand. Ultimately this is a story about property, and money, and power, and white supremacy. It implicates all of us. In The Barn, Thompson brings to life the small group of dedicated people who have been engaged in the hard, fearful business of bringing the truth to light. Putting the killing floor of the barn on the map of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, and the Delta, and America, is a way of mapping the road this country must travel if we are to heal our oldest, deepest wound.

About the Author:

Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN and the bestselling author of Pappyland and The Cost of These Dreams. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi with his family.

Conversation Partner:

A native of Evans, GA, Susan Glisson holds two bachelor’s degrees, in religion and in history, a master’s degree in Southern Studies, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William and Mary. She has been widely recognized for her leadership, including being named a “Hero of the New South” by Southern Living and Time magazines, a “Boundbreaker: People Who Make a Difference” by NPR in 2016 and a Champion of Justice by the Mississippi Center for Justice as one of “The Courageous Thirteen,” who challenged Mississippi’s discriminatory HB1523 bill against the LGBTQIA community in Barber v. Bryant in 2016. She has twice been a Salzburg Fellow and was named the Pamela Krasney Moral Courage Fellow at The Mesa Refuge in 2022. She serves on the board for Black Mountain College School of Theology and Community and is a 2023-2024 fellow with the Square One Project’s Collaborative on Reckoning and Justice at Columbia University. She is currently in residence in Cambridge as an Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow at Harvard University.