Reckoning & Remembrance

Last year, Wright Thompson published The Barn: The Secret History of A Murder In Mississippi, following the events leading up to the teenager’s brutal murder during his visit to see family in Mississippi. In interviews, he talks directly about how the historical reckoning based on a location or place of brutality, inequity, and hate can contribute to the continued division among people and society.

Before the atrocious unfolding of Emmett Till’s time in Mississippi, he grew up in Chicago. Upon his death, his mother Mamie Till-Mobley demanded that his funeral clearly show the violence enacted upon the fourteen-year-old boy. The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Chicago asks visitors to remember the family as they lived their daily lives, and as they mourned the death of Emmett.

Raised in a loving family, no one was able to see what Emmett would have done as he continued to grow up, into his adult years. He is only one example of so many Black people in the United States who were violently treated, murdered, and left without justice.