Tag Archives: lynchings

From the Lifeless Pages of History Books to the Big Screen: Chinonye Chukwu’s Till (2022)

By Sabrina Völz

“The lynch­ing of my son has shown me that what hap­pens to any of us

any­where in the world had bet­ter be the busi­ness of us all.”

Mamie Till-Bradley in Till

Photo credit: Maxim Hopman
Pho­to cred­it: Max­im Hopman

The name Till is one that most Amer­i­cans and many peo­ple around the world will rec­og­nize from their civ­il rights his­to­ry lessons. In 1955, while vis­it­ing fam­i­ly, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chica­go, was bru­tal­ly beat­en and mur­dered for alleged­ly flirt­ing with and whistling at a mar­ried white woman near Mon­ey, Mis­sis­sip­pi. His bloat­ed body was lat­er found in the Tal­la­hatchie River.

I must admit that when I first heard about the film Till, it imme­di­ate­ly sparked my curios­i­ty. Yes, I thought. The heinous crime that caused a media fren­zy and gal­va­nized the civ­il rights move­ment needs to be brought to new gen­er­a­tions. But wait. We live in an age of trig­ger warn­ings (state­ments that alert read­ers or view­ers to poten­tial­ly dis­turb­ing con­tent) and audi­ences with a height­ened sen­si­tiv­i­ty to vio­lence. So how can film direc­tor Chi­nonye Chuk­wu draw view­ers to movie the­aters and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly do jus­tice to the bru­tal­i­ty of that crime?

It also intrigued me that Chuk­wu placed Emmett Till’s moth­er, Mamie Till-Bradley, in the film’s cen­ter. If she’s men­tioned at all in Amer­i­can his­to­ry text­books, it’s main­ly to rec­og­nize the role she played in the deci­sion to show the world what South­ern hatred looked like. She was the dri­ving force to ensure an open cas­ket at Emmett Till’s funer­al. So what does the film reveal that most his­to­ry books do not?

Read more »