A post-WW2 American South sought to secure its own brand of systematic racism by silencing the negro whenever possible.
This campaign of utmost piety seemed well to success: undermining the influence of Brown v. Board in favor of launching legal suits against the ruling, or ignoring the law outright. Influencing local institutions to uphold the Jim Crow. Condemning the role of blacks in Southern politics to an irrelevant and dispensable case of wasted votes and potential.
It was sequential, calculated and humiliating in every sense until the murder of Emmett Louis Till in August of 1955.
Till, a teenager who came from Chicago, begged his mother for a vacation in the Mississippi Delta so he can visit relatives. Till was murdered by Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam after being accused of whistling at Bryant’s wife, Carolyn, at a local grocery store. Although the actual details are difficult to ascertain, Till was abducted from his temporary residence at his great-uncle’s house and killed. His body thrown into the Tallahassee River.
Emmett Till’s was the first extensively recorded case of an open-casket funeral for a black citizen. Till’s was important because of the circumstances behind his death. And it was the scars of Till’s proliferated body that made headlines across the world, sparking the American Civil Rights Movement.
The documentary, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, by director Keith Beauchamp and hosted by the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture, retells the series of events before and after Till’s death, courtesy of his late mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. The film itself utilizes the testimony of Till’s friends and family to this end, capitalizing in extensive courtroom footage to further speak of the horrifying ordeal. The film took nine years to make, being released in 2003. And Beauchamp hopes to convert the documentary into a feature film.
Suffice to say, everything else is self-explanatory, for Till’s narrative will forever be a quintessential piece of American history.
