Next Friday will mark 60 years since 14-year-old Emmett Till traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to visit relatives, only to be brutally murdered for allegedly making inappropriate comments to a white woman. The sight of Till’s mutilated body, by all accounts, served as one of the major flashpoints for the Civil Rights Movement. On Wednesday, Whoopi Goldberg announced plans to make a movie about Till’s massacre.
For those who don’t recall, on the night of August 28, 1955; Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam drove to the Money, Mississippi home of Till’s uncle, Moses Wright, and yanked Till out of bed. They had been driven into a rage after Carolyn Bryant–Roy’s wife and Milam’s sister-in-law–told them that Till had wolf-whistled at her. They beat him for several hours before shooting him in the head and throwing him into the Tallahatchie River. Years later, Till’s cousin, Simeon Wright, as well as another person who was in the store, said that Till never said anything inappropriate to Carolyn Bryant.
Till’s body was discovered three days later. His mother, Mamie, demanded that her son’s body be returned to Chicago for burial and insisted on an open-casket funeral. She later said that “I wanted the world to see” the results of the massacre. It had the desired effect. The sight of Till’s beaten and swollen remains galvanized blacks across the country into action. Indeed, when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a Montgomery bus three months later, she said, “I thought of Emmett Till and I just couldn’t go back.” Myrlie Evers said years later that the massacre of Till told blacks around the country that “not even a child was safe from racism and death.”
Milam and Roy Bryant were acquitted of murder in a trial held later in 1955–partly due to racism, but also because of doubts that the body fished out of the river was really that of Till even though a silver ring with Till’s initials and 1943 birthdate were found on it. However, they brazenly admitted to the massacre in an interview with Look magazine in 1956–a move that led in part to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which allowed the federal government to intervene in local cases when there was evidence of civil rights violations.
The movie, entitled simply “Till,” will also have Keith Beauchamp and Frederick Zollo as co-producers. Beauchamp’s 2003 documentary, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” prompted the federal government to reopen the Till case in 2004. A 2005 autopsy proved conclusively that the body pulled out of the river was indeed that of Emmett Till, torpedoing racially-inspired assertions that the NAACP had stolen a cadaver and planted Till’s ring on it.. While a mostly black Mississippi grand jury knocked down Beauchamp’s assertion that Till had been lynched by as many as 14 people, Beauchamp does deserve credit for knocking down this urban myth.
It won’t be the first time that Goldberg has worked with Zollo either. Goldberg portrayed Myrlie Evers in”Ghosts of Mississippi,” Zollo’s depiction of the 1994 trial of Byron De La Beckwith, the man who murdered Myrlie’s husband, Medgar.
Goldberg apparently feels this film needs to be made. In a statement, she said that Till’s massacre turned the hot lights on the culture of the 1950s Deep South, in which it had long been acceptable to “uphold that kind of racism without any fear of repercussions.” She felt that “the return of rampant, unchallenged racism” meant Till’s story needed to be told once again.
“Till” is due to start production early next year. There’s a Kickstarter campaign already underway to raise money for production; click here to contribute. Sounds like this movie will be worth the price of admission several times over.
