Till

2022 Universal Pictures

Rated: PG-13

Length: 2 hrs 10min

Drama ~ True Story ~ History

Starring: Danielle Deadwyler, Jalyn Hall, and Frankie Faison.

“This was my boy….Emmett Till. He just didn’t understand how different things were in Mississippi. The lynching of my son has shown me that what happens to one of us anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all.”

Danielle Deadwyler stars as Mamie Till, a single Mother and Teacher in Chicago, Illinois raising her 14 year old son Emmett. Mamie puts Emmett on a train south to visit with relatives in Money, Mississippi. Before she takes him to the train station she stresses to him how different Mississippi is for Black folk. “Be small…..don’t draw attention to yourself.”

Emmett is picked up at the train station in Money, Mississippi by his Uncle Mose “Preacher” Wright and his cousin Wheeler Parker. The next day he joins his Aunt, Uncle and cousins as they pick cotton, being sharecroppers on a Plantation. After picking cotton Emmett and his cousins stop at the white-owned Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. Emmett enters to buy some penny candy and tells Carolyn Bryant behind the counter, “You’re pretty…….you sure look like a movie star.” As he leaves he whistles at her.

That was the wrong thing for a black man to do in 1955 Mississippi, whistle at a white woman. Carolyn Bryant’s husband and half-brother hunt down Emmett and take him to a barn where they lynch him, beat him mercilessly, shoot him in the head, then dump his body into the river. Mamie hires a lawyer and, after finally retrieving his body from Mississippi and seeing how horrific he died, decides to display him in an open casket for the whole world to see.

Mamie Till made it her duty to crusade on Emmett’s behalf for justice for the racially motivated brutal killing of her son. She never gave up, even after the trial in Mississippi where The Bryants were found not guilty of murdering her son. She made it her life’s work to become an activist for Civil Rights and her determination played a pivotal role in The Civil Rights Movement.

This is a True Story about a very important and pivotal moment in our country’s history in The Civil Rights Era. It took Emmett’s brutal racially motivated death, and Mamie’s fierce determination to not let this happen to anyone else ever again, to incite change.

I love the true story movies. This true story is a nauseating, revolting look at our troubled past as a Nation. The pure blatant disregard for a fellow human beings life based solely on the color of his skin is disgusting, a child nonetheless……

As hard as parts of it are to watch, I think you need to watch it. Just as Mamie thought that the whole world should see Emmett’s disfigured body in the open casket, we need to witness the mistakes of our past so that we can be a collective whole moving forward.