By Dwight Casimere
The movie ‘Till’ which opens everywhere
Oct. 28 is a cautionary tale of what happens when hate spins out of control. The film tells the story of the August 28, 1955 abduction, torture and lynching of Emmett Louis Till, a 14 year-old African American boy from Chicago, who was sent by his family to spend the summer with his southern relatives in Money, Mississippi. This was a common practice for black families in the inner cities at the time. It would become a demarcation line, signifying the death of the Jim Crow South and the birth of the Civil Rights Movement.
Announcement of the film’s World Premiere at the 60th New York Film Festival took place on July 25, what would have been Emmett Till’s 81st birthday.
Besides its premiere screenings to festival audiences, the film was shown to thousands of high school students at the NYFF site at Lincoln Center and remotely at high schools in Chicago, Till’s home town, Atlanta, Boston, Dayton, Ohio, Louisville and Philadelphia.
The event featured a post-screening Q and A with New York Mayor Eric Adams and the entire cast, including Till director Chinonye Chukwu, cast members Danielle Deadwyler, Jalyn Hall, and Sean Patrick Thomas, producer and co-writer Keith Beauchamp, and Emmett Till Legacy Foundation Co-Founder, Deborah Watts.
The film was produced by Whoopi Goldberg, who also appears in the film as Till’s grandmother.
Till features Oscar-worthy performances by Danielle Deadwyler as Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley and Jalyn Hall as the doomed teen.
The ghost of Emmett Till still hovers like a shadowy specter over every aspect of society more than 65 years after his awful demise. Anti-lynching laws have only recently been enacted, and no justice has been exacted against the perpetrators of the crime even after the published confession of the white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, now in her ‘80s, in a 2017 book, which says that she lied when she claimed that Till grabbed her and was sexually menacing. A grand jury had a last chance to revive a resurfaced arrest warrant against her, but declined to move forward.
The two white men accused of murdering Till were acquitted by an all-white and all-male jury with no chance of a retrial.
Director Chinonye Chukwu and her co-screenwriters Keith Beauchamp and Michael Reilly expertly lay out in realistic detail the circumstances leading up to the tragic event. Raised on Chicago’s south side, young Emmett had a very different view of White people and how he should react to them than his southern cousin Simeon (Tyrik Johnson) and great uncle “Preacher” Mose (as John Douglas Thompson, a man morally torn by his ‘Sophie’s Choice’ decision. “I had to keep them from killing all of us!” He declares in the film).
A testament to the power of Chukwu’s film is the fact that this I was so shaken by its content that I was compelled to walk out of the premiere screening for a moment at Walter Reade Theater to collect myself emotionally.
I saw Till’s body lying in state at Roberts Temple Church of God. The open casket bore his mangled body, which was unrecognizable as anything resembling the beaming young face seen in historic photos and in the film’s portrayal. The actual sight was far more horrific than anything Hollywood makeup artists could have conjured. In fact, my grandfather, who took me to the Till viewing, insisted on going in to view the body first before allowing me to go inside to see it for myself. Till’s disfigured visage haunts me to this day.
I was eight years old and growing up on the south side of Chicago the year that Emmett Till was killed. I’m sure I am not alone when I say that his death had a profound and immediate impact on my young life. Gone were those carefree summers of visiting relatives in the south where I could realize all of my Tom Sawyer-like fantasies of going fishing, meandering down a local river or a stream in a boat and running freely barefoot through a field without fear of cutting my foot on broken glass or looking over my shoulder for a knife or club-wielding gang member.
After Till’s murder, I was on lock-down for about two years. I couldn’t go to the park to play little league baseball, even though my parents had spent a minor fortune on my uniform and equipment, which included a coveted Willie Mays fielder’s mitt. Valued even then at more than a hundred dollars, I oiled it religiously, only to return it to its original box unused. By the time my parents had lifted the curfew, I had lost all interest in baseball.
Till is a movie that is essential viewing. In this age of election denial and mounting hate from the militant right, it is both a warning and a declaration of what the great James Baldwin predicted as ‘The Fire Next Time.’ There have been several ‘Emmett Till’s over the last decades that have sparked movements. Till’s murder launched the Civil Rights Movement in this country. George Floyd’s murder was the lynchpin for the global Black Lives Matter explosion. Quo Vadis?
