Last week, a woman named Nan Prince met me in the lobby of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, in Jackson, and walked me to an elevator. We rode down to the basement and she used her keypad access to open a final door as we stepped into a dark room. She went to find the light switch while I stared at the shadowy silhouette of a .45 pistol sitting on a rolling cart. This was J. W. Milam’s gun; he wore it the night he and his brothers killed Emmett Till. The FBI believes it fired the fatal shot.
The lights clicked and there it was, faded blueish nickel, Army issue, stamped United States Property. One tiny sticker on the clip read 2025.48.1: the first item in the 48th acquisition of the year. Another sticker, on the holster, read 2025.48.2. Someone, likely Milam, had carved the initials J. M. into the leather, along with Tippo, the Delta town where his family was living when he went off to fight the Germans.
Prince turned the gun over. I never touched it.
“It gives you the heebie-jeebies,” I muttered.
“I’ve been in this field a long time,” she said quietly. “I’ve never had an artifact affect me like this.”
She placed it carefully on a thick piece of museum foam. The FBI’s file said that Emmett Till had been pistol-whipped before he was killed. I bent over the gun. The sights on the back of the slide had been violently mashed down and twisted, as if someone had used the gun as a hammer.
Prince walked me up to the museum floor and showed me the permanent exhibit on Till’s murder, where the gun will sit starting today, the 70th anniversary of the killing. A video, narrated by Oprah Winfrey, told the story of Till’s mother’s courage as two visitors listened in the dark. A rotunda nearby displayed the names of lynching victims, including Medgar Evers and Emmett Till. I counted 14 empty spaces where more names could be added.
When it was time to leave I walked outside and thought about what Tommy Goodwin had told me a few weeks earlier. He’s the deputy director at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, which operates the museum, and he’d read about the gun in my book The Barn, which was published last year. An FBI source had told me who owned the weapon, and I found it sitting in a safe-deposit box in a bank in Greenwood, Mississippi, the property of a crop-duster pilot and his sister, who’d inherited it from their father. I don’t know how their father got it.
Goodwin thought the gun needed to be in a museum, where it could teach a lesson, rather than just floating out there, its menace remaining somehow alive. Museums make history safe enough to study and consider, and the MDAH persuaded the owners of the gun to let the museum acquire it. Goodwin met the pilot for the handoff. The gun came wrapped in a rag inside a plastic Kroger shopping bag. Goodwin held it. He wished he hadn’t. That night he struggled to sleep.
I felt the same sense of unease as I walked to my car. Behind me in the museum, state officials were meeting with people from the Smithsonian, which is currently being pressured by the Trump administration to edit its history exhibits—a strange turn of events. The federal government’s traditional role in the South was as the defender of the truth and of the weak against individual states. But now the government is attacking both facts and those without the power to defend themselves, while in Mississippi—in a museum that owes its existence to the liberal former governor William Winter and the conservative former governor Haley Barbour—people on both sides of the ideological divide are working to preserve the exact kind of history that is under threat.
In the year since The Barn was published, I’ve watched as the context around it has changed. The central idea of the book, which grew out of an article for this magazine, is that everything we think about the settling of America and manifest destiny is wrong, and that a 1,300-year-deep history of the 36 square miles of land around the barn where Emmett Till was tortured to death could reveal the truest history of our nation, a history hiding in the tall grass of mythology and spin.
But I noticed something pretty quickly after the book came out. The people at my book talks wanted to know about 1955, not just to learn the truth for its own sake but because they wanted to understand what future might be coming for our country, and how that future might be shaped. The cruelty and rhetoric of 2025 are not new, a slide toward the world that condoned the killing of a child as somehow necessary to protect the dominant social order. The Barn was written about a not-so-distant past but has become, at least based on the questions I’ve been getting, a book about the future.
Its final section focuses on the forces and people trying to scrub the memory of Emmett Till, and the individual Americans fighting back. In the closing pages, these men and women successfully lobby the Biden administration—taking on powerful opponents in both parties, it must be said—to establish the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument permanently installed in both Chicago and the Mississippi Delta, forever linking those two nodes of the Great Migration.
The day of the announcement at the White House felt triumphant. A group of us went out to a big celebratory dinner at a Capitol Hill steakhouse and then returned to our hotel. In the lobby, I saw the Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr. alone. He was Till’s cousin and best friend, and is the last living eyewitness to his kidnapping. When the men came to get Till, Milam pointed his gun in Parker’s face first.
In the hotel lobby that night, he seemed melancholy. I didn’t understand. Now I think I do.
“Nobody kills like America,” he told me once. I thought he was being literal, and he was. But I think he also meant something else. Erasing the history of a murder is a second death—a final killing. Salting the ground for generations. The National Park Service has been ordered to ask visitors to report any signs or displays at any of its sites that portray America in a negative light. Confederate statues that had been removed are being put back on their pedestals. The last names of Confederate generals are being restored to bases housing the soldiers of the very Army they tried to defeat.
Erasure is the first commandment of Making America Great Again, and the real question is how far back that lost greatness lives. Seemingly half the country believes in undoing many of the changes unleashed since 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was passed; since 1955, when Brown II forced the integration of schools not long before Till died, a direct catalyst for his death; since 1948, when President Harry Truman desegregated the Army.
Even the Smithsonian is at risk of losing its trusted place in American life. The last time I was at the National Museum of American History was for an Emmett Till event, a commemoration ceremony for the installation of the historical marker that had been near the Tallahatchie River, memorializing Till’s body coming out of what locals called the “Singing River” because so many Black bodies had disappeared into its maw. The sign was riddled with bullet holes—white violence still surrounds Till. A new bulletproof marker stands watch over the slow-moving water.
I once went to the banks with a member of Emmett’s family, Sharon Wright. She stared in silence. I asked what she was thinking about. She told me she was grateful, and I must have looked shocked. She explained that Emmett had gotten out of the river, unable to escape death but somehow escaping the oblivion of disappearance. I’ve thought about that moment a lot in the past few months. He got out of the river and now there are powerful people who think that he never should have, and that America would be better if history could somehow throw him back again.
And yet, J. W. Milam’s gun is on display in Jackson, starting today.
In Mississippi, for a day at least, memory is winning. When the South chooses truth and remembrance, especially right now, that’s a hopeful data point. Memory is always a choice, and nothing is more intrinsic to southern identity than memory, which is why these fights have been happening in the first place.
Sometimes I think so many people in the South are religious because religion offers, through ritual and liturgy, a simple vocabulary for understanding and describing the complex interplay between and across generations. Southern identity was once entirely agrarian, but the reason so many southerners voted to support this administration’s assault on the American farmer is because almost no southerners have anything to do with the dirt anymore. Their grandparents would have known better but they’d been in the angry travel-ball suburbs too long to remember what a tariff does to a commodity market. Being southern is now less about living in communion with the seasons and more about hating the same group of people. The identity is fragile and up for grabs.
I recently was a guest on a podcast for Southern Living, the house organ of the nostalgia set, and while talking about The Barn and the modern South, I mentioned the incontrovertible fact that the dominant working-class and agrarian breakfast in the South today is the breakfast taco, not the biscuit. People lost their minds. Some of the messages I got about biscuits were as angry as the ones I’ve gotten about telling the truth about Emmett Till. A reason emerged. The sausage biscuit, the country-ham biscuit, the biscuit covered with sawmill gravy—these are the only talismans left from a once-vibrant constellation of rural patterns and traditions. Almost nobody makes their own sage sausage in the smokehouse anymore. They buy it in a store owned by a publicly traded company. In many cases, an heirloom biscuit recipe, written on a 4-by-6 note card in your mother’s or grandmother’s looping blue ink, is the only part of the family farm that’s survived. By mentioning tacos, I was assaulting with inconvenient facts a final, frayed link to a familial past. Dismissing biscuits and naming names from 1955 were the same sin against the same doxology.
The acquisition of the gun matters then, in Mississippi especially, because during a summer when all the political momentum favors rewriting history, there are still people here telling the truth about the past. The southern response to 1965, 1955, and 1948 was institutional nihilism—fighting a losing war for the glory of self-immolation. But in this fraught year of 2025, while there is certainly nihilism to go around, there are also acts of institutional hope. Because how history is taught here, how it is remembered, isn’t an abstraction but a way to measure civic confidence. History is how we decide who we are and where we’re from. Eudora Welty once got asked in an interview why she’d live someplace like Jackson, Mississippi. She looked hard at the questioner.
“Because it’s home,” she said at last.
I’ve talked about that home—speaking in Mississippi about Mississippi—constantly for the past year, and these conversations have left me believing that most of my fellow citizens long for a kind of radical centrism. Last weekend, I went to talk to a big crowd in Columbus, in the eastern part of the state, where the whole town was reading The Barn as a prompt for community-wide conversation. The strongest crowd reaction came when I responded to a question about our future by talking about a desperate need for a new tribe of Mississippians—a state united for the future, not forever divided by the past. It’s a point I’ve made at nearly every event, and nothing gets more nods, across race, class, and geography, than when that aspirational tribe is evoked. Every crowd I’ve spoken to wants a Mississippi where we all admire and claim William Faulkner and Kiese Laymon, Jesmyn Ward and Eudora Welty, Muddy Waters and Elvis Presley. William Winter and Haley Barbour. Installing J. W. Milam’s pistol in a museum is an investment in that aspiration, the work of a state strong enough to look its past in the eye; humble enough to pray for the arc to still bend, even a little, toward justice; proud enough to believe in a Myrlie Evers-Williams quote I think about all the time, especially on days like today.
“Yes, Mississippi was. But Mississippi is.”
The post Seeing Emmett Till’s Murder Weapon appeared first on The Atlantic.
