The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till

Keith Beauchamp's riveting documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till is the culmination of a 10-year effort to uncover the truth about the brutal, racially-charged murder of a 14-year-old black teen named Emmett Louis Till, who died at the hands of two white men from rural Mississippi in a slaying that served as a catalyst for the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Young Till broke one of the deep South's oldest racial taboos when he whistled at a white woman while visiting relatives in the township of Money, Mississippi, in August 1955, Afterwards, he was abducted from his great-uncle's home, beat, tortured, mutilated, and shot until his corpse was virtually unrecognizable, then bound with barbed wire to a 70-pound cotton gin fan and dumped into the Mississippi River. The white suspects were acquitted in a courtroom trial with an all-white, all-male jury, and were later paid $4,000 to confess their crime to a reporter, hiding behind double-indemnity laws ensuring that they could not be retried for their crime. Using a combination of archival footage and in-depth interviews with many of Till's surviving friends and family (including his mother Mamie Till Mobley, who died in 2003 without seeing her son's killers brought to justice), Beauchamp's film played a pivotal role in getting the Till murder case reopened in 2004 (a final outcome is still pending). The coroner's photos of Till's mutilated body may be too much for some viewers to handle, but are a vital part of this story, as Till's mother knew when she demanded that her son's body be displayed in an open casket at his widely-attended funeral, sparking widespread moral outrage. While viewers will learn about the oppressive nature of race relations in the “Jim Crow” South of the post-World War II era, it's the interview with Mobley—who describes the sight of her son's mutilated body in graphic detail—that will be most remembered. Highly recommended. (J. Shannon)