PHILADELPHIA — Some movies are more important than others.
Which is why, when I heard there was a new movie coming out about Emmett Till, I felt I should organize a screening for local high school students.
I’ve done this before, inviting a group of 11th graders to watch "Harriet" with me in 2019. The year before, students from St. Basil Academy, Philadelphia High School for Girls, the Camden School for the Performing Arts, and Camden’s Pride Charter School joined me for a free screening of "On the Basis of Sex," based on the life of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. I did the same thing in 2013 with the film "42," which tells the story of the rise of the late great baseball player Jackie Robinson.
I love watching young people see history come alive for them on the big screen. I imagined that many teens today didn’t know about Emmett Till and the impact of his all-too-short life. So I arranged to have students from Sankofa Freedom Academy and the Creative Arts High School in Camden watch "Till" with me on Tuesday.
At the screening, I asked whether the students were familiar with the story of Emmett Till, and how the 14-year-old Chicago resident — then younger than they are now — traveled in 1955 to vacation with his Mississippi cousins, only to return home in a casket. Many hands did not go up.
Some students, such as T’Keyah Lewis, 16, knew exactly who Emmett Till was and can walk you through the entire story, having gone on a school trip south to historic sites key to the civil rights movement. But for others, the story was unfamiliar.
The lights dimmed and a hush fell over the theater. And for the next two hours, the students got to learn about the life of a young man who didn’t live long but is still being talked about.
The movie is PG-13, but it is often hard to watch. After he was murdered, Till’s mother, Mamie Till, wanted the world to see his mutilated body. “They have to see it for themselves,” she says in the movie. We, as an audience, saw a recreated version of his body, too. At one point, a girl in the audience yelled out in anguish.
At that moment, I doubted my decision to show such a brutal story to teenagers. But then I told myself that Till’s mother had a point. They have to see it for themselves.
The new "Till" movie is not “trauma porn,” as some have accused it of being. It’s our history — American history — and an all too important chapter, with tendrils that stretch well into modern times. The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act didn’t pass until earlier this year, nearly 70 years after his death.
Growing up, we didn’t get a lot of Black history in school. I learned about Emmett Till from my father, a high school physical education teacher and basketball coach in Washington, D.C. I still remember watching the deeply disturbed expression spread across his normally jovial face as he explained to us how Till had gone into a grocery store and supposedly whistled or said something objectionable to Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who was working as a clerk. He wound up paying for whatever it was that happened with his young life.
I no longer remember when I happened across the now famous photos of Till’s grotesquely disfigured face that appeared in Jet magazine. I do remember feeling shaken. He’d been beaten so brutally that he no longer looked human.
During the trial, Bryant testified under oath that Till had grabbed her — a lie that she recanted decades later. Despite overwhelming evidence, her husband, Roy Bryant, and his accomplice, J.W. Milam, were tried before an all-white, all-male jury and were quickly acquitted. Afterward, they sold an interview to Look magazine, during which they admitted their guilt.
They’re long gone now. But they each got to live out their lives and become old men, something Till wasn’t allowed to do. Carolyn Bryant is still alive; in August, a grand jury declined to indict her on kidnapping and manslaughter.
Watching "Till," I couldn’t help but think of other Black boys and men who also were victims of vigilante injustice. Like Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old killed in 2012 by a self-appointed neighborhood watch captain, and Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed jogger who was shot to death in 2020 by two men in Brunswick, Ga., who also suspected him of being a thief, as well as the many others whose names we’ll never know.
After the movie ended, I spent a few moments talking to a group of male students from Camden’s Performing Arts High School. English instructor Iran L. Mercado referenced the talk that Till’s mother had had with him before he traveled south.
“There’s a certain type of way that we as men of color have to exist in the world,” he reminded his young charges. “There are rules that we have that don’t apply to anybody else.”
That was something Mamie Till told Emmett in 1955, but we’re still saying a version of it today, Mercado noted.
“The gist is pretty much the same,” he told his students. “In order to protect ourselves and in order to get back home to our parents, there’s a certain type of way that we as Black and brown men have to behave.”
So, yes, the new Emmett Till movie, which opened on Friday, deals with a disturbing subject. But go and see it anyway. Take your teenagers, and maybe some of their friends, too. This is a story they have to see for themselves.
