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In 1955, at the age of 14, Emmett Till was murdered by white men for ‘whistling at a white woman’. Now the story of his mother has come to the big screen, writes Tymon Smith

Till is on circuit.

It’s an image burnt into the history of the 20th century, helping to transform the nascent civil rights struggles of the late 1950s into the wave of protest that led to the legal recognition of black Americans’ human rights in the 1960s. The 1955 photograph of the battered face of 14-year-old Emmett Till, lynched by white men hell-bent on exacting revenge for his alleged sin of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, was taken by David Jackson and published — on the insistence of Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley — in Jet Magazine for the world to see what racists had done to her son.

The image and the story of Emmett became a touchstone for social and cultural protest, inspiring a 1960s Bob Dylan song and, more recently, a controversial 2016 painting by white US artist Dana Schutz.

Almost 70 years after Emmett’s murder and two decades after the death of his mother, the photograph has found depressingly familiar resonance in the era of Black Lives Matter and the continued deaths of black men at the hands of white killers, from Eric Garner to George Floyd and beyond.

Emmett’s story has been extensively told, but that of his mother and the lifechanging effect her son’s death had on her

— one that spurred her to become a leading advocate for the civil rights movement — has been less widely explored. Now it’s the subject of a television miniseries, Women of the Movement, and a new feature film.

Till stars Danielle Deadwyler, nominated last week for a Bafta for her performance as Till-Mobley, Jalyn Hall as Till and Whoopi Goldberg, who spent the better part of the past two decades trying to get the project off the ground, as Mamie’s mother Alma.

Directed by Nigeria-born Chinonye Chukwu, the film focuses on Mamie and Emmett’s relationship in their hometown of Chicago, leading up to Emmett’s fateful trip to Mississippi to visit relatives, the aftershock of his murder and the sham trial of the two men, Roy Bryant and his halfbrother JW Milam. They were acquitted by an all-white jury after five days of trial and 67 minutes of deliberations. Though the film shows Emmett’s body and the events leading to the photograph, it refrains from showing the violence of his final moments.

Emmett’s story was told as a cautionary tale to 15-year-old Hall to prevent something similar happening to him. Deadwyler, born in 1982, first heard the story in primary school and recalls it was burnt into her memory because her mother was born in 1955. She says: “I knew the image of Emmett — beautiful and smiling — and I knew the image of the horror that happened and the image of Mamie’s grief, her mourning, and we all know the image from Jet. Though I grew up in the civil rights-conscious environment of Atlanta, it wasn’t with the intimacy and knowledge we get from the film.”

Deadwyler felt she could trust Chukwu to care for the story in the way it needed. “Chinonye explicated flat out that she wasn’t witnessing any violence; she talked deeply about what kind of care everyone would receive and that’s what you want to know — that you can come out on the other end. It’s not just for the screen, this kind of experience, it’s beyond the screen. Hearing that from her made me go forward.”

For Deadwyler, the film, while reflecting several issues that continue to plague race relations in the US, is also a tribute to the determination of Till-Mobley, who spent decades trying to bring the story to the screen before her death in 2003. “I’m just happy that it’s happening in the way Mamie would have wanted. She wanted a film made — because that has a global dynamic

— to help understand that this is part of a conversation for all oppressed people.”

She hopes the film will not only provide a moving portrait of one woman’s struggle to obtain justice for her son and other victims of racial abuse, but bring home the importance for oppressed people to connect and see that disenfranchisement is global. “It’s appalling and a shameful continuance. People have to continue to fight for justice for the betterment of ourselves.”

Lifestyle

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2023-01-29T08:00:00.0000000Z

2023-01-29T08:00:00.0000000Z

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