Bailey Thornton’s Reviews > The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi > Status Update

Today, as we stand here, memories of Emmett echo around us. Memories that have become emblematic of a national struggle with racial justice. But it is essential that we remember that Emmett was not just a symbol, he was a boy.

This book is for the ignorant boy I was and all the ignorant boys like him, like me. For the white kid in the delta of Mississippi, or in the bedroom suburb of Birmingham or charlotte or Atlanta. Everywhere the poison of the lost cause is spread.

I read Willy Morris’s “North Toward Home,” which showed me that it was possible to both love and hate a place. It taught me to be suspicious of those who did only one of the two.

Sending a message to Black folks is one of the key factors that separates a lynching from a murder. In a lynching, it’s not just the killers who are guilty, it’s the dominant culture. Thousands of people created the dominant culture that killed Emmett, and many thousands more benefitted from it. And while there’s no way to unravel the complicated web…there is a way now to say I’m sorry. It was wrong.”

By the summer in 1955, a long battle came to a head over the issue of southern integration…they had been chipping away at segregation. He understood, though, that schools were more fraught. The unspoken issue at the core of the debate was always sexual. It had always been about white girls sitting in desks next to black boys.

Many of these [statues] were placed quite intentionally on the lawns of local courthouses, sending a message about the law and who it was designed to protect. Most of the monuments around the state were built during the brief, but emotionally powerful cotton boom. Not a single courthouse status in the state of Mississippi was erected after 1923. The lost cause was always about cotton and money.

Farming in the delta had always been a profit center for outsiders who controlled the dirt but never had to endure living on it or dying in it or being buried under it. The arrival of the English industrialists was part of a long tradition.

He was white and black. He was Mississippi. One part of himself at war with another part. Mississippi was killing itself, and the blues was the soundtrack.

“After the war, a fifth of Mississippi’s budget would be spent on artificial limbs.”

Wild stat alert!!!

Why did a bright, hopeful child get murdered for whistling in 1955? What about the intersection of Emmett and the Mississippi delta at that specific time led to his death.

The attitudes and intentions are why we should bring it up. To interrogate the present to see what of the past remains.