White racists brutally murdered young Emmett Till in 1955 in Mississippi. His death, and his mother Mamie’s reaction to it, helped spark the civil rights movement. Till tells their compelling story.
Writer/director Chinonye Chukwu tells this story “from the maternal point of view of Mamie Till-Mobley.” We see Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler) singing and dancing with 14-year-old Emmett (Jalyn Hall). She ties his necktie, helps him pack, and loves him deeply.
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When Mamie Till-Mobley put Emmett on a train in Chicago to visit Mississippi relatives, neither suspected impending tragedy. Emmett was outgoing, had a sense of humor, and loved church involvement. Mamie envisioned him as a pastor someday.
One August evening, Emmett encountered store clerk Carolyn Bryant, a married white woman. Bryant later claimed Emmett flirted, grabbed her, and wolf-whistled at her. Carolyn’s husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Emmett at gunpoint. Three days later, Emmett’s horribly mutilated body was found in a river.
Chukwu “refused to depict [all the] brutality in the film,” focusing instead on “Mamie’s remarkable journey in the aftermath.” We do see Emmett’s terribly disfigured face and Mamie demanding an open-casket funeral for the world to see. Thousands came, and Jet magazine published pictures of the corpse, sparking widespread outrage.
Roy Bryant and Milam stood trial for murder, and witnesses to the abduction testified. But the defendants said they released Emmett alive, and the defense argued the mutilated body was unidentifiable. In Till, Deadwyler poignantly depicts Mamie’s courtroom testimony as she says she knew her only child’s entire body and that corpse was Emmett’s, even bearing his father’s ring.
The jury of 12 white males deliberated for just 68 minutes (including their Coke break), acquitting both. A few months later, protected by double jeopardy laws, Bryant and Milam sold their murder confessions to Look magazine.
In 2005, DNA tests confirmed the exhumed corpse was Emmett’s. In 2007, Carolyn Bryant recanted her story, though not without controversy. Grand juries have twice declined to indict her, most recently in August 2022.
Despite the failure of criminal justice, Emmett’s death and Mamie’s response helped inspire the U.S. civil rights movement. Rosa Parks later said she thought of Emmett when deciding to keep her bus seat, triggering the Montgomery bus boycott, eventually led by Martin Luther King Jr. The 1963 March on Washington fell on the eighth anniversary of Emmett’s death.
In the wake of the tragedy, Mamie traveled across the country promoting racial justice and became a teacher who trained children to deliver speeches by MLK. “God told me, ‘I have taken one from you, but I will give you thousands,'” she wrote.
Sometimes overlooked in her story is spirituality’s central role. Dartmouth professor Vaughn Booker argues that Mamie’s faith was foundational to her handling of Emmett’s murder and her civil rights activism. “I prayed for … strength … and … courage,” she recalled of Emmett’s death. “Lord, take my soul … show me what you want me to do, and make me able to do it,” she prayed at the funeral.
Knowing that Emmett had “accepted Jesus Christ” comforted her. But, as often happens in crises, she questioned God: “I had prayed for answers, and when they didn’t come right away … I became angry with God. Why had this happened to Emmett? Why had this happened to me?”
Over time, she saw the good that emerged from the tragedy: “I … thanked God that He felt that I was worthy to have a son that was worthy to die for such a worthy cause,” Mamie said. She maintained, “Emmett was not mine … he belonged to … God, [who] had chosen him for this particular mission.”
She felt Emmett’s brutal death helped her better appreciate “what Jesus had given for us, the love he had for us.”
“I never felt any hatred for Bryant and Milam,” she said. “But as horrible a crime as they committed against my little boy, against me, against society, their true crime was against God.” Each died before her; she lamented their eternal state: “I feel so very sorry for them. In this world, they only had Mamie to deal with.”
Till makes me glad this world had Mamie to deal with. This moving film powerfully presents her story with grace, dignity, and passion.
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Rusty Wright is an author and lecturer who has spoken on six continents. His film commentaries and columns have been published by newspapers across the country and used by more than 2,000 websites.
