UB Spotlight + Preview: Director + Cast Talk ‘TILL’

“TILL” premiered in select theaters October 14th and will be everywhere October 28th via United Artists Releasing.

Directed by Chinonye Chukwu with a screenplay by Michael Reilly & Keith Beauchamp and Chukwu, Till tells the heartbreaking true story of the historic lynching of 15-year-old Emmett Till — for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Money, Mississippi in 1955 — through the eyes of his mother Mamie Till-Mobley. This is what makes the film so compelling, it’s told through the perspective and experience of a Black woman and is co-written and directed by a Black woman.

Mamie Till-Mobley is a widowed single mother who is the head of her household, the only Black woman working for the Air Force in Chicago, who simply wants a better life for her son. Till-Mobley becomes a revolutionary by insisting that the world witness the horror of her brutally maimed son’s body in an open casket viewing as an act of defiance against oppression and hate. “I wanted the world to see what they did to my boy,” she said at the time. Till-Mobley also gave the exclusive rights to Jet Magazine to publish the images of her son’s maimed body which caused the lynching to gain worldwide notoriety.. A mother’s audacity became a lightning rod in the Civil Rights Movement and propelled her to reluctantly become an outspoken activist for the NAACP advocating for social justice and education.

Till-Mobley represents so many phenomenal Black women in American history who are heroes (oftentimes hidden figures) for demanding justice, refusing to shrink in a horrific moment of racial/social injustice, and turning profound trauma into triumph in the continuing fight for civil rights, equality, and humanity.

The actors in “TILL” bring this socially conscious film to life with passion and deep emotion. Danielle Deadwyler portrayal of Till-Mobley is defiant and charismatic Whoopi Goldberg, who plays Till Mobley’s mother Alma Carthan (and serves as a producer of the film), is both complicated and vulnerable as the matriarch of the family negotiating traditional Southern racist practices and modern Northern quests for Black liberation and feminism. Jalyn Hall as Emmett Till is jovial with a childlike innocence. Roger Guenveur Smith’s role as Dr. T.M.R. Howard, while brief, is memorable and commanding. Haley Bennett (Carolyn Bryant), Jayme Lawson (Myrlie Evers), and Tosin Cole (Medgar Evers) all transport you back to the racial charged history of 1955. “TILL” is a modern day masterpiece shining a light on an important American story that has been hidden from the public and education system.

UB Spotlight & Preview: Director + Cast Talk “TILL!”

Mamie Till-Mobley embodies the film Till’s mise-en-scène, a tale of dignity, joy and humanity that prevails over evil.

Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley (born Mamie Elizabeth Carthan; November 23, 1921 – January 6, 2003) was an American educator and activist. Born in Mississippi she moved with her parents to the Chicago area during the “Great Migration.” She was the mother of Emmett Louis Till, who was murdered in Mississippi on August 28th, 1955, aged 14, after allegedly interacting “inappropriately” with Carolyn Bryant, a white cashier at a local grocery store. After her son’s murder she became an educator and activist in the Civil Rights Movement. “God told me,” she said at the outset of her crusade for social justice, “I have taken one from you but I will give you thousands. I have left something of myself in all the children I have touched.” This creed is at the center of Till, a period piece, yet contemporary reflection on the state of our tangled society as seen through the eyes of a mother who will just not quit in the face of racism and cultural terror tactics, who led a pursuit for justice for her son. Mamie chose to let Jet Magazine and others publish the horrific photos from the open casket funeral, which became a galvanizing moment for the civil rights movement.

And so, the filmmakers set out to tell the tale of a bond between a mother and son and the extraordinary journey a mother takes to not only seek justice for her son’s lynching by white supremacists in 1950’s Mississippi but to make sure he wasn’t forgotten. Horrified by the mutilation of her son’s body, Mamie made the stunning decision to have over 50,000 people view Emmett’s corpse in Chicago which caused many people to faint at the sight and smell of the body or leave in tears.

Martin Luther King Jr. put it this way in a stirring speech in Montgomery, Alabama few months after Emmett’s funeral. He called what happened “one of the most brutal and inhuman crimes of the twentieth century.” Soon after King’s speech, the Montgomery Improvement Association, which King was president of, staged the 13-month Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott was catalyzed by Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to give her bus seat to a white woman. But Till-Mobley’s decision that her son’s desecrated body be publicly seen was indelibly woven in the minds and hearts of Black people across the country, galvanizing many to say enough is enough. “When people saw what happened to my son,” she said, “men stood up who had never stood up before. People became vocal who had never vocalized before.”

Mamie Till-Mobley was more than Emmett Till’s mother. She was a catalyst for arguably the most culturally transformative movement in modern American history, a public-school teacher who advocated for equal educational opportunities for Black children and a woman whose story didn’t begin or end with the death of her son. And it’s a story everyone should know, and with the feature film “TILL,” they will.