Hello and

Hello and welcome to Why Is This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

The 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a black boy in Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi,

is probably one of the most infamous crimes in American history,

maybe even the most infamous crime in American history, along with the assassination of Abraham

Lincoln. It's also the inspiration for the explosion of civil rights activism that would

come to define what we call the civil rights era.

It's also a story about the country's original sin, about how violent the nation was then and continues to be to this day.

It's also a story that gets passed down in textbooks as a lesson for children about the evils of segregation, the evils of the Jim Crow authoritarian regime in the Old South.

But it's a story that in some ways is far more gothic, more fascinating, more complicated, and richer than I ever really realized.

And I say that having just delved into a phenomenal new book on the murder by Wright Thompson.

He's a fantastic writer. We've had him on the program before.

He's a senior writer for ESPN. He's a

jack of many trades. And he has a new book about the murder of Emmett Till. It's called The Barn,

The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. And Wright Thompson joins me now. Great to having the

program, right? Man, it's a real pleasure.

Where are you from in Mississippi?

I am from Clarksdale, Mississippi, and my family's farm is 23 miles from the barn where

Emmettill was murdered, which is the main character in this book we're talking about.

I want to talk about the barn and how you kind of found your way to it, but I want to stay

with your family and cotton.

You come from a family that grew cotton that has a cotton farm, if I'm not mistaken, right?

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