Madeline Heneghan reflects on the powerful and important new film on the lynching of Emmett Till, and her travels on the Blues Highway

Till is a film that is long overdue. It tells the true story of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who in 1955 was abducted in the middle of night, tortured and shot through the head, before his body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River, weighted down with a heavy, metal fan tied around his neck. His ‘crime’ was to flirt with a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, breaking the unwritten rules of the racially segregated US South, where notions of white supremacy reigned, enforced by racial terrorism. No one has ever been convicted of the lynching of Emmett Till.  Bryant’s husband and his brother were found not guilty by an all-white jury. Protected by the double jeopardy law, they confessed to the murder in an interview with Look magazine the following year, for which they were reportedly paid $4,000.

Till’s focus is on Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, played brilliantly by Danielle Deadwyler. Scenes in their Chicago home, filled with love, song and laughter, show the bond between mother and son. As Emmett prepares to visit cousins in Mississippi, Mamie becomes increasingly anxious, warning her son that he must behave differently and ‘be small’ around white people in the south. Knowing the outcome, we share her dread.

The ‘Blues Highway’

In September of last year, traveling the ‘Blues Highway’ through the Mississippi Delta region, I visited the town of Drew where Emmett Till was taken to be beaten, mutilated and murdered, and Money, Mississippi where the exchange with Carolyn Bryant happened at the family store in which she worked. I hadn’t planned to visit those places, but the blues trail inevitably becomes a journey into racial subjugation and the civil-rights movement.

The Blues provided the soundtrack to the Great Migration in which over six-million African Americans, among them Emmett Till’s family, migrated north in a bid to escape the laws and brutality of Jim Crow that tied them to the cotton plantations and the back-breaking work of share cropping, which had replaced plantation slavery. Some of this history is commemorated, but much remains hidden.

In Drew, a tiny place, essentially made up of a row of shops, there are heritage boards referencing its musical associations, but after sixty-seven years, nothing to inform of the brutal events which took place there in 1955, infamous around the world. Drew had a decidedly uncomfortable feel, somewhere you wouldn’t want to linger. At a café, I asked a waitress for directions to Money. She pointed me to two guys eating lunch, the only black people in the café. While explaining that I wanted to pay my respects to Emmett Till, I found myself almost whispering.

Money was a thirty-minute drive through remote forest land fringing the Tallahatchie River, the river from which Emmett Till’s mutilated body was retrieved three days after his abduction. We travelled in silence, thinking of how Emmett Till would have felt on that same journey, bundled into the back of a truck by white men with guns, and flanked by at least two black men who worked for the Bryants.

The scene in the film in which Emmett is woken and taken in the middle of the night is both harrowing and heart breaking. Emmett, played superbly by Jaylin Hall, searches for his socks, still naïve to the danger, in contrast to his southern-born cousins for whom the outcome is inevitable. One of the most powerful scenes in the film is when Emmett’s uncle explains to Maime that when Bryant and his brother came to take Emmett, it wasn’t just two of them that he was facing, but all the white men in in the town, the police and the authorities upholding the status quo of white domination.

Money today is even less of a place than Drew, not the lively community depicted in the film. We knew we had arrived when we saw the heritage sign next to an old disused shop with a petrol pump at the front. The sign, part of the Mississippi Freedom Trail, titled ‘Bryant’s Store’, detailed the horrific events sparked when ’fourteen-year-old Emmett Till came to this site to buy candy in August 1955’. The place was deserted until Pauline, a middle-aged black woman, drove up. She’d come from Birmingham, Alabama to research Emmett Till. In the 35-degree heat, we sat on the shaded steps of what we assumed was Bryant’s Grocery Store, and she told us that she had been to this place before, but that she was looking for the heritage marker where Emmett Till’s body was pulled from the river.

We didn’t know its location, but we had seen photographs of it shot through with bullet holes, and I’d read a recent article about it being repeatedly replaced after such shoot ups. As I was looking through the window of the store, which looked frozen in time, Pauline said, ‘This isn’t the store. It’s not Byrant’s, that’s it.’ She was pointing to a crumbling building a few feet away, so overgrown and hidden that we hadn’t even noticed it. Pauline explained that to prevent the building being used to remember Emmett Till, it had been bought by the family of one of the jurors who acquitted Bryant and his brother. Though the state had plans to turn the building into a heritage and memorial site, the family today refuse to sell. The determination to deny that any crime was committed persists today.

The injustice continues

In the film, the lack of any kind of remorse was made clear. The murderers were proud of their actions. The visceral hatred that the local whites had for black people is portrayed in the court scenes, where even Mamie’s white lawyer treats her with contempt. That the guilty walked free is not what was exceptional about Emmett Till’s murder; thousands of black people were lynched with impunity in this period. What garnered worldwide attention was Mamie’s decision to have Emmett’s brutalised body transported home to Chicago and displayed in an open coffin for five days leading up to the funeral, to ‘let the world see’ what had happened to her child.

Thousands of mourners and the national press attended. Politicised by her involvement with the NAACP, Mamie brought the practice of southern lynching to national and international attention, and in doing so galvanised the civil-rights movement. Three months later, Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, reportedly saying that she was thinking of Emmett Till when she refused to give up her seat to a white man.

Till is an important and highly relevant film. The conditions that led to Emmett Till’s brutal murder have not been confined to history. Race continues to be the fault line of a country that in living memory operated an apartheid system. In August of last year, a Mississippi jury failed to convict Carolyn Bryant for her part in Emmett Till’s murder, quashing the hope of some kind of justice.  Segregation in housing and employment, though not enshrined in law, nevertheless persists in the US today.

A horrible encounter in a hotel dining room with the Daughters of the Confederacy left me in no doubt that ideas of white supremacy are openly and unashamedly celebrated. The murder of George Floyd by police in 2020, like that of Emmett Till’s, is not exceptional in the fact that it occurred, but exceptional in that it caught the attention of the world and mobilised anti-racist movements. Both Till and the guilty verdicts returned in the case of George Floyd, following international Black Lives Matter protests, demonstrate that justice is not simply granted, it has to be fought for.