Wright Thompson

I watched that George Clooney movie, Jay Kelly, the other night and was just thinking like, you know, shit, I've done some people dirty and have been done dirty.

So that thing you're talking about, like we have to sort of get to a place where everybody understands that we all have light and dark and are all capable of things and that a mob is always wrong.

The mob is what's wrong.

In 1785, Thomas Jefferson came up with this thing called the Land Ordinance Act.

And it sounds simple now, but it dropped a grid over all of America.

And it basically turned...

this sort of wild American frontier essentially into government-backed securities.

It was this huge gold rush.

People were buying this land on maps and they'd never seen any of it.

And so the grid numbers became very important.

So the grid number where Emmett Till was killed is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian.

And when you start looking at all of the people in and out of that square of land and especially all of the money,

in and out of that square of land, you understand, first of all, that Mississippi

has never really been governed for the benefit of Mississippians.

I mean, it was a colony of Manchester, Liverpool, and London for a very, very long time until the price of cotton collapsed.

And since then, it's essentially been a ward of the United States government.

A lot of the sort of like anti-government stuff that is very much tied into Brown v. Board of Education, it's very much tied into Truman desegregating the army.

There had never been a Confederate flag in an Ole Miss football game

until Truman desegregated the army in 1948.

I mean, that's when it started.