 |
Turning
Point FILM:
The Murder of Emmett Till (NR)
DIRECTOR: Stanley Nelson
WHERE: 7 p.m. Sunday,
Oct. 17
Prytania Theatre, 5339 Prytania St., 891- 2797
GRADE: A-
 |
| Mamie
Till grieves beside her son's casket in Stanley Nelson's
award-winning documentary, The Murder of Emmett Till.
|
For an entire century after the
Civil War, African Americans lived in a state of second-class
citizenship, discriminated against in countless ways. In Southern
states, that discrimination was codified in the so-called Jim
Crow laws that denied black people equal education, equal voting
rights, equal access to public facilities and equal protection
by the law. Legalized segregation was reinforced by attitudes
of racial superiority that were preached in the white church,
proclaimed from the white-dominated political platform, and taught
in the white home.
Those black people who defied submissive expectations, or
were just accused of doing so, were subjected to beatings and
worse. An unknown number of black men were lynched for the purported
crime of disrespecting white women. And those whites who murdered
their black neighbors were seldom identified, rarely prosecuted
and almost never convicted. The social practice by which whites
could commit violence against blacks lasted into the 1960s when
the Ku Klux Klan and their allies could kill civil rights activists
without fearing the sanction of justice. The senseless, vicious
killing of a black teenager in 1955, however, finally piqued
the national conscience. That's the story producer/director
Stanley Nelson tells in his documentary, The Murder of Emmett
Till.
Written by Marcia Smith, The Murder of Emmett Till
won the New Orleans Film Festival's Documentary Award and the
Grand Jury Prize. The Emmy-nominated film recounts how a high-spirited,
roly-poly black boy traveled from his home in Chicago to visit
with his Uncle Mose Wright who lived in the Mississippi Delta.
The only child of a soldier killed in World War II, Emmett turned
14 just weeks earlier that summer. Raised in the city by his
mother, Mamie, Emmett was looking forward to the pleasures of
spending some time in the country. Things went well for a while,
and Emmett enjoyed himself. Then one afternoon Emmett accompanied
his cousins into the tiny nearby town of Money to get soft drinks
and candy at the general store. White owner Roy Bryant was away
that day, but his pretty young wife, Carolyn, was behind the
counter. The other boys exited first. After making his purchases,
Emmett, it was said, stopped in the doorway, turned back to
Carolyn and whistled at her. Other accounts of this incident
have questioned whether Emmett was whistling at Carolyn or at
his cousins or whether he even whistled at all. Nelson and Smith
assume that the whistle was consistent with Emmett's sassy but
good-natured personality.
Whatever really happened, Carolyn Byant alleged that a black
teenager had treated her with disrespect, and the black teens
fled back to their uncle's farm, afraid that they were going
to get in trouble. When nothing happened for three days, they
assumed that nothing was going to. Then in the wee hours of
the third night after the incident, Bryant and his brother-in-law
J.W. Milan showed up at the Wright house and took Emmett away
at gun point. Several days after that, Emmett's badly beaten
body surfaced on a river bank. A 75-pound cotton-gin fan had
been attached to his neck with a strand of barbed wire. An eyeball
dangled from its socket, and his face was otherwise so disfigured
that Wright could only identify him by a family heirloom ring.
This incident might have slipped from history little noticed,
save that Mamie Till insisted on leaving her son's casket open
at his funeral. Photos of his brutalized face outraged fair-minded
people of whatever race, and a cry for justice rang out across
the land. Remarkably, perhaps, Bryant and Milan were arrested
and charged with murder. But every lawyer in the county joined
their defense team, that argued they were innocent because the
mutilated body wasn't that of Emmett Till, who, they claimed,
was part of a communist plot and was still alive. In two acts
of astonishing courage, another black teenager, Willie Reed,
testified that he'd seen blood-stained clothing and Emmett's
shoe in Bryant's pick-up, and Wright testified that Bryant and
Milan were the men who took Emmett away on the night he disappeared.
Nonetheless, an all-male, all-white jury found them innocent
in less than an hour. Protected by the rule of double-jeopardy
from further prosecution, Bryant and Milan sold an interview
to LOOK magazine in which they admitted they were the
killers.
Mamie Till, still alive and amazingly articulate, appears
in this film and urges us to understand her son's death as a
pivotal event in launching the Civil Rights movement. The film
certainly makes clear the horrifying extent to which white-on-black
violence stood completely outside the rule of law in our very
recent history. If I have a criticism of this film, which won
the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, it's that,
at less than an hour, it's too short. What happened to Bryant
and Milan after their acquittal? How did they live and die?
To what extent, if any, did they pay for their crime? Mose Wright
lost his farm. How did he sustain himself? What is Reed's story
after the trial? 
Other Stories This
Week in Movies:
Film Review
The
Weather Underground
Film
Listings
Other Stories by Rick Barton:
Film
Review 09
23 03
Film
Review 09
16 03
Film
Review 09
09 03
Rick Barton Archives
|
|
