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'The Murder of Emmett Till' Airs Monday

By Jeralyn, Section Media
Posted on Sat Jan 18, 2003 at 11:53:21 AM EST
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Put this on your calendars now: The Murder of Emmett Till will air on PBS Monday, January 20, 2003 at 9:00 pm, EST, check local listings for the time in your area.

A synopsis of the crime:
In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old black boy whistled at a white woman in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Emmett Till, a teen from Chicago, didn't understand that he had broken the unwritten laws of the Jim Crow South until three days later, when two white men dragged him from his bed in the dead of night, beat him brutally and then shot him in the head. Although his killers were arrested and charged with murder, they were both acquitted quickly by an all-white, all-male jury. Shortly afterwards, the defendants sold their story, including a detailed account of how they murdered Till, to a journalist. The murder and the trial horrified the nation and the world. Till's death was a spark that helped mobilize the civil rights movement. Three months after his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, the Montgomery bus boycott began.

Here is a description of the film.

From our earlier post:
A new film could bring justice to the case of Emmett Louis Till, "a 14-year-old black Chicagoan who was kidnapped, mutilated and brutally murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955."

Two men who admitted abducting the boy were acquitted of his murder. Despite riots over the incident, no one was ever held accountable. Now, due to a new documentary by 31-year-old Keith Beauchamp, the case could be reopened.

Beauchamp grew up in Lousiana and when he was 10 or 11, he found a picture of the mutilated body of Emmett Till. He has been obsessed with the case ever since, spending the last six years filming and tracking down witnesses.

The trial took place in Tallahatchie County which at that time only had all white juries even though the population was two-thirds black.

"In the minds of many Mississippians in 1955, a black man could justifiably be lynched even for looking at a white woman. Emmett was tortured and killed for allegedly "wolf whistling" at Mr. Bryant's wife, Carolyn, a storekeeper in Money, Miss. One of the tragedies of this case is that the so-called "wolf whistle" was probably a misunderstanding. Emmett had a speech impediment. When he got stuck on a word, he would stop spea