The Atlantic: “But the way Till’s name exists in the firmament of American history stands in opposition to the gaps in what we know about his killing. No one knows, for instance, how many people were involved. Most historians think at least seven were present. Only two were tried: half brothers J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. Another half brother, Leslie Milam, was there that night too. He lived in an old white farmhouse a few dozen steps from the barn, next to where Jeff Andrews’s house now stands.
In 1955 an all-white, all-male jury, encouraged by the defense to do their duty as “Anglo-Saxons,” acquitted J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. Because the defendants couldn’t be tried again, they got paid to make a confession to a national magazine—a heavily fictionalized account stage-managed by their lawyers—and Leslie Milam and his barn were written out of the story. Ask most people where Till died and they’ll say Money, Mississippi, the town where Till whistled at Bryant’s wife outside the family’s store. An Equal Justice Initiative monument in Montgomery says Money. Wikipedia does too. The Library of Congress website skips over the barn, which is just outside the town of Drew, about 45 minutes from the store.
…During one of my visits, Patrick Weems sat next to me as I navigated the backroads near Drew. A young, white Mississippian, Weems co-founded the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in nearby Sumner, to commemorate the places where Till spent the last days of his life. Weems is now working with Wheeler Parker, Till’s cousin and the last living eyewitness to the kidnapping, to create a series of monuments in Chicago, where Till grew up, and in Mississippi, where he died, with the hope that they might one day form a new national park. That’s why the barn matters now. There’s money, energy, urgency bearing down on the dentist and the long cypress building overlooking his pool, which is made somehow more menacing by the way it just sits there, unmemorialized.”