A Boy's Murder and a
Black Awakening

By Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

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An adage from journalism school goes like this: "If you have a story, tell it. If you don't have a story, write it." Meaning that if you have news, give it straight and quick. If you don't have any, give the reader the most well-written narrative that you can. I'm reminded of this rule after screening "The Murder of Emmett Till," the latest and most riveting documentary by Stanley Nelson, a recent MacArthur Fellowship recipient who has accomplished himself by chronicling African American history.

There is nothing fancy in this documentary—no tricks or expensive re-creations—and there is no need for any because what Nelson has here is a story. In a lean and gripping one-hour of telling that story, of the grisly murder of a Black 14-year-old boy in Mississippi in 1955, Nelson convinces us that Till's murder was an important catalyst for Civil Rights Movement that changed the course of the United States.

This is in-your-face history for those of us who run from it, who weren't born in 1955 and wonder why we have to go there, for everybody who doesn't understand that less than 50 years ago in Mississippi, a Black boy could be tortured, shot and drowned because he whistled at a White woman. And for those who remember the case well, Nelson offers, probably for the first time, interviews with witnesses who have never spoken publicly about the case.

Take, for example, Wheeler Parker, Till's cousin, who remembers White men coming in the pitch black night, with flashlights in one hand and pistols in another, to take Emmett Till from the bed in his great uncle's house. Or Willie Reed, an 18-year-old sharecropper who saw Till with his murderers, Roy Bryant and J.W Milam, two half-brothers who ran a convenience store selling candy and sodas to a clientele of young Blacks.

Reed's courageous testimony, encouraged by reporters covering the case, along with testimony from Till's grandfather did not dissuade the all-White, all-male jury from acquitting Bryant and Milam. It did not encourage then President Dwight D. Eisenhower to even answer the telegram from Till's bereaved mother, Mamie Till Mobley. But that testimony, along with Till's mutilated body that his mother displayed at a public viewing near his home in Chicago and in the pages of Jet Magazine, did confirm for a shocked international public the barbaric nature of American racism.

By allowing these voices to be heard, Nelson and writer Marcia A. Smith have allowed this important moment in Black history to be told and interpreted by the Black people who lived it. And they have told the story in the context not of misery but of eventual triumph. It reminds us that 100 days after Till's death, Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a White man in Montgomery, Ala., sparking the Montgomery bus boycott.

Says Mamie Till Mobley, (who recently died on Jan. 6, just days before this television premiere), "when people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before. People became vocal who had never vocalized before… Emmett's death was the opening of the Civil Rights movement. He was the sacrificial lamb of the movement."

"The Murder of Emmett Till" repeats throughout February on PBS. Check local listings.

Esther Iverem's reviews often appear on BET.com and Africana.com.

Related Sites:

• PBS: The Murder of Emmett Till

-- February 3, 2003

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