This March, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that should have been in the books long ago: a federal ban on lynching. It’s called the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, named after the African American14-year-old who in 1955 was brutally murdered by armed racists in Mississippi. There have been plenty of books and poems and songs and documentaries about Till’s killing — and about his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who became a civil rights activist — but there has never been a big narrative movie. That omission has finally been corrected.
Monday saw the debut trailer for Till, produced by Whoopi Goldberg and starring The Harder They Fall and Station Eleven’s Danielle Deadwyler as Till-Mobley. It’s a devastating promo, showing Till-Mobley shipping her young son (Jalyn Hall) from Chicago down to the Mississippi Delta to visit relatives. It’s there that he’s accused of flirting with a white woman, leading to his abduction and murder — and to his mother making sure the world knows where racism leads.
Till, which hits theaters in October, arrives as white nationalism is again on the rise in America, and as Donald Trump allies let loose telling Freudian slips. And it comes as headways are being made in creating more diversity in Hollywood, which is one reason why there’s finally a big movie about Emmett Till.
Till arrives in theaters on October 7. You can watch the trailer in the video above.
