Emmet Till was one of the most significant figures in the American Civil Rights movement, though outside the United States his name may not be as well-known as it should be.
His story has been the subject of several documentaries, but as far as I know Till is the first feature film dramatisation. It’s currently streaming on Prime Video.
Photo: Screenshot
Emmett Till was a 14-year-old kid in 1955. His family had moved out of rural Mississippi and settled in Chicago, where Mamie Till found a good job and a nice house.
One day Emmett – nicknamed Bo by the family – is invited down South for a couple of weeks to meet his cousins.
Mamie has severe doubts. Bo only knows life in the gregarious big city, he has no idea what life is like in hard-core racist Mississippi.
She tries to tell him, but he’s a kid, he doesn’t listen. He’s on holiday.
Emmett Till was a friendly, jokey kind of kid. So, when he buys some candy at a shop, it never occurs to him not to joke with the hard-faced white woman behind the counter.
But his cousins know. Get in the car, they scream. She’s got a gun. Her name is Carolyn Bryant.
And that’s one thing a movie can do - show you precisely how something like this can happen.
There’s a knock at the door that night, Bo is taken and that’s the last his family see him alive. But that’s by no means the end of the story. There’s a lot more to come.
Till was directed by Nigerian-born Chinonye Chukwu, and written by Emmett Till scholar Keith Beauchamp.
What grabs you is how closely it seems to stick to the well-documented facts. This is a story that needs no dramatic help at all. And what happened next made history.
When Emmett Till’s body was returned to his mother, it was almost unrecognizable. And out of her icy rage at what had happened to her son, Mamie Till made the decision that Emmett be shown in an open coffin.
And she demanded that everyone look.
It was that – and the famous photograph of the event – that forced the lynching of Emmett Till off the “typical Southern crime” pages of the country’s newspapers and onto the front page.
This was one of the first headline-grabbing moments of the late Fifties that finally put Civil Rights on the political agenda, a hundred years after the Civil War.
Danielle Deadwyler, who plays Mamie Till, is absolutely riveting – from hot passion to cold fury. She was nominated for a Bafta, which you’d think alone would have earned Till a cinema release, but sadly no.
This is a story you may think you’ve heard before – particularly the courtroom scene, when belatedly two of the people responsible were charged.
But many of the stories you know – notably Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird – were inspired by that of Emmett Till.
As I say, you need to see it to get some sense of the reality of life for the black citizens of 1955 Mississippi. And I want to give actress Haley Bennett a particular tip of the hat. The casually racist Carolyn Bennett is possibly the most poisonous character of the year.
Today it’s a crime that almost beggars belief. But it’s not the worst thing about this story.
Long after the crime, and the appalling injustices that followed, things did start changing for the better. In 1957 the Civil Rights Act was passed - the beginning of a long, slow journey.
And eventually Emmett Till’s name was attached to an Anti-Lynching Act. Shockingly, it was finally signed in 2022.
As Mamie Till said, it’s the business of us all. This is an old story that deserved to be told, not because it’s a familiar one with a familiar title, but because most of us didn’t know it. Or at least didn’t know all of it.
It’s on Prime Video, and if you can see it, do see it.
