Content area
Full Text
The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till (2005): A Film by Keith Beauchamp
In 1955, after Jet magazine published the horrifying photograph of the disfigured corpse of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, news organizations around the world for the first time began paying attention to racially motivated murders in the American South. In many ways, the story of Emmett Till - the African American child who was brutally murdered in the Mississippi Delta by white men who believed that he had "wolf whistled" at the white wife of the owner of Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in the tiny town of Money, Mississippi - triggered the beginning of the civil rights movement in the United States.
Fifty years later, Keith Beauchamp released The Untold Story of Emmett Till, a documentary that exposed the legal travesty that followed the murder for decades. The two men responsible for the murder - shop owner Roy Bryant and his half-brother John W. Milam - were acquitted by an all-white jury in 1955. Although the U.S. Department of Justice reopened an investigation in 2004 based in part on Beauchamp's exhaustive research into the case, the men directly responsible for the murder were dead, and no one was ever convicted for Emmett's murder.
Beauchamp's documentary did, however, serve as a wake-up call about unresolved civil rights-era cases, leading several southern states and the U.S. Congress to re-open "cold cases" on racially motivated murders from the 1950s and 1960s. The power of the documentary - like the power of Jet's disturbing photo of Emmett's corpse - rests in its testimony to the horrifying consequences of the...