Over the years, Woodberry has had numerous speakers come talk to students about a wide variety of topics, but very few have been as well received as Wright Thompson.

Thompson, a former Woodberry student, is a renowned sportswriter. He is a senior writer for ESPN, a New York Times bestselling author, and an Emmy Award-winning reporter. However, Thompson didn’t come to Woodberry to talk about his time here or give students his hot sports takes; he came to share the story behind The Barn, his best-selling book about the murder of Emmett Till.

Emmett Till was a young teenage boy from Chicago who had gone to Money, Mississippi, on his summer vacation. He was staying with his great-uncle, Moses Wright, and several cousins. While visiting, he and his cousins went into town and stopped at a convenience store, where Till allegedly whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. Emmett Till was kidnapped by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam four days after the alleged incident. Till was beaten, shot in the head, had a large metal fan tied to his neck with barbed wire, and was thrown into the Tallahatchie River. His murderers got off free after an all-white male jury acquitted them.

“When I wrote the book, people asked me who my audience would be, and I imagined this room,” Thompson told Woodberry students during assembly. “I was a student here years ago and felt totally lost. I felt like I lived with one foot in a modern world and one foot in this sort of Old South that I think only existed in my nostalgia. I had a bunch of Confederate flags up in my room. I wish I could go to that idiot kid and tell him everything I’ve learned. I wanted this book to be a letter to that version of me when I was your age.”

Although Thompson finished high school in Mississippi, just miles from the barn where Emmett was killed, he didn’t learn about Till until college at the University of Missouri.

“One of the main themes in the story is erasure,” said Thompson. “The state of Mississippi did everything in its power to erase the story of Emmett Till. They destroyed the transcript of his trial, and would tear out stories about Till from the state archives — all to ensure they would not be connected to the murder of a child.”

The biggest key for Thompson in writing the story was being true to the facts and to the living members of the Till family, who still deal with the heartbreak they suffered in 1955.

“The hardest thing in the world to do is tell the truth,” said Thompson. “You don’t want to pull punches. I wanted to be humble, not claim I knew more than I did, and be empathetic to the lives of the people who were brave and graceful enough to tell their story.”

To ensure the truth, Thompson made sure to verify his information thoroughly.

“I was relentless about saying where everything came from,” said Thompson. “Any time you’re a white guy writing about this, you just don’t want to get nuked. I felt like I could get hit on either side. Am I going to have a bunch of, like, crazy left people furious at me, or am I going to have a bunch of crazy right-wing people furious at me? Then, when it came out, there was no incoming. So there was nothing inaccurate and there was nothing unfair. And I think everybody — whether they agreed or disagreed — felt like I did it with integrity and empathy.”

Thompson put the onus of shaping America’s future on Woodberry boys and students like them:

“You guys will decide our future and decide what we remember, how we remember, what we erase, and what we preserve. It was my fervent hope, when I was finishing this book, that it would be a prayer for people in rooms like this one — who have the power to make our world whatever you guys think it should be. I feel like the future of the South is, in many ways, the future of America.”

Woodberry is always looking for authors to come and speak. So when Ben Hale, the head of the English Department and Wright Thompson’s former advisor, reconnected with him, he knew Woodberry needed to hear this story.

“I wanted to get that type of writer in front of Woodberry,” said Hale. “There was also a personal element to it as well. He left under some traumatic circumstances, having been expelled, some thought, somewhat unfairly. As he described in his speech, he was punished for telling the truth. I don’t think he dwelled too much on his time at Woodberry, but as he moved on with his life, I think there was a sense of, ‘Let’s get this guy back in the family, so to speak. Let’s get him reconnected to Woodberry, so both sides can have some needed healing.’ And I think that really happened.”

“Wright Thompson was probably my favorite speaker since I've been at Woodberry,” said Charlie McKay ’25. “He wasn’t just talking at us — he was talking to us. Usually, students can lose interest during some of these talks, but this time, everyone was sitting up in their seats.”

During his two-day visit to Woodberry, Thompson also joined Headmaster Byron Hulsey for an episode of the Woodberry Podcast. You can listen to it here. 

— Reporting by Ry Cobbs ’26