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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 were charged with the torture and murder of the 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. After their acquittal by an all-white jury, they gave a false confession to a journalist; one that was misleading about where the murder took place and who was involved. In the course of half a decade''s research, Wright Thompson has learnt that almost everything we have been taught about Till''s murder is wrong. At least eight people can now 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: Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half. The Barn brings to life the small group of dedicated people who have been engaged in the hard, fearful business of bringing the truth to light. In the process, it offers a revelatory new account of white supremacy in America - uncovering how, over the course of 200 years, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, went from being Choctaw land, to a slave plantation, to a sharecropper''s farm, to the site of the most notorious murder in US history. The result is both a deeply reported account of one of the most infamous moments in American history and a panoramic new account of the history of white supremacy. It maps the road that America - and the world - must travel to heal its oldest, deepest wound.
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Wright Thompson grew up in the Mississippi Delta, just a few dozen miles from the place of Emmett Till’s murder. His 2021 article in the Atlantic, ‘His Name Is Emmett Till’, led to nationwide calls for a memorial at the site. The New York Times bestselling author of Pappyland and The Cost of These Dreams, he lives in Oxford, Mississippi with his family.
