From the Magazine
Hollywood 2017 Issue

The Tragic Story of Emmett Till Finally Gets Hollywood’s Attention

Three different projects about the 1955 lynching, including a Jay Z–produced HBO mini-series and a movie starring Taraji P. Henson, are in the works.
Mamie Till Bradley at Emmett Tills coffin.
Mamie Till Bradley, supported, from left, by Bishop Louis H. Ford, Gene Mobley, and Bishop Isaiah Roberts, as her slain son’s body arrives in Chicago, 1955. Inset, Emmett Till and his mother, 1950.Large photograph, from Bettmann/Getty Images; Inset, from The Everett Collection.

In the summer of 1955, a 14-year-old Chicago boy whistled at a white woman in Mississippi and for that was tortured, beaten, and shot to death. His suspected killers were acquitted by an all-white jury in just over an hour. His name was Emmett Till. And in 2017, as Black Lives Matter draws attention to police killings of unarmed people of color, and as white supremacists receive renewed public exposure, Hollywood is asking moviegoers to say Till’s name—loudly. (This season has already brought forth two compelling books: Duke scholar Timothy Tyson’s The Blood of Emmett Till as well as Writing to Save a Life, a meditation by PEN/Faulkner honoree John Edgar Wideman.) On the horizon is a six-episode HBO series—with Jay Z, Will Smith, and Casey Affleck among the executive producers—based on Devery Anderson’s 2015 biography, Emmett Till. Next, Whoopi Goldberg (who is also directing), Fred Zollo (Mississippi Burning, Ghosts of Mississippi), and Keith A. Beauchamp will produce a film based on a script co-written by Beauchamp, who, a dozen years ago, sparked renewed legal interest in the case through his powerful documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.

Read: The Woman at the Center of the Emmett Till Case

Meanwhile, Boyz N the Hood’s John Singleton is attached to direct a third Till drama, to be produced by Michael De Luca (American History X, The Social Network) and Laray Mayfield, with a screenplay by Michael Roden And Jerry Mitchell, the MacArthur Award–winning journalist whose reporting since 1989 helped convict four Klansmen of fatal 1960s hate crimes. In the third project, Empire’s Taraji P. Henson is slated to portray Till’s resilient mother, Mamie Till Bradley, who, by insisting that photos of her son’s disfigured body be published, served to galvanize the civil-rights movement. Says Steven Caple Jr., a force behind the HBO mini-series, “We’re not competing. We just want one of us to get it right.” Odds are they will.

Photos of the Scenes Where Police Killed 8 Black Americans

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Photograph by Kris Graves.
Eric Garner, Staten Island (3:30 P.M.)
Eric Garner died a 10-minute walk from the ferry terminal. In the park across the street, men gamble at a game called “quarters.” Outside of the Bay Beauty Supply, there is a small Plexiglas memorial with flowers in it. The man selling incense and oils outside of the store says he made the memorial. He says he had been on that street hustling, like Garner, for more than 30 years. He says he knew Eric and saw him in the neighborhood the day before he died.
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