In 1955, 14-year-old African-American Emmett Louis Till was kidnapped, maimed and shot dead in Mississippi.
where he was on vacation with relatives, for “offending” a white woman in a shop. The cruel lynching is today seen as one of the spark sparks in civil rights protests, and the battle of Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley , to spread the news about her son’s death by holding a funeral with an open coffin, transformed the boy in a posthumous movement icon. This terrible episode will now be told in the movie Till , of which you can see the trailer below…
Till is directed by Chinonye Chukwu and co-written by the director with Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp . Danielle Deadwyler plays Mamie Till-Mobley, Jalyn Hall plays Emmett Till. The rest of the cast includes Whoopi Goldberg , Frankie Faison , Jayme Lawson, Tosin Cole, Kevin Carroll, Sean Patrick Thomas, John Douglas Thompson, Roger Guenveur Smith and Haley Bennett . The film will be released in the US in October; we are waiting to know the Italian date.
The true story
Born and raised in Chicago, Emmett Till traveled to Money, in the Mississippi Delta area, in August 1955. After walking into a grocery store and interacting with 21-year-old married woman Carolyn Bryant who owns it. , was kidnapped by the woman’s husband, Roy , and her half-brother, JW Milam , who broke into the home of Till’s great-uncle with guns. There is no certainty as to what happened in the shop, but Emmett was accused of flirting with the woman, and thus violating the unwritten code of conduct for a black male, when interacting with a white woman, in the southern part of the country. read Jim Crow.
For this, Bryant and Milam beat him, mutilated and finally executed him with a blow to the head, and then threw his body into the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, Emmett Till’s body was found. The mother decided to hold a funeral ceremony with an open coffin, to show the world the swollen and mutilated body of the boy. The news caused a stir and drew much criticism on the Mississippi, but that was not enough to get justice: Bryant and Milam were acquitted by a jury of whites only and, later, protected by the prohibition of trying people twice for the same crime, admitted they were guilty in an interview published in Look magazine, selling their story for $ 4,000.
In December 1955, the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott began, leading the Supreme Court to decide that segregating buses was unconstitutional. Emmett Till’s lynching is now seen as a catalyst for those events and the struggle for black civil rights. In 2022, Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, a law that makes lynching a federal hate crime.