She’s one of sixteen entertainers to win an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award and a Tony Award and yes her magnetic screen presence blesses us every single time!
This time the screen goddess will be bringing the reality of racism to screens starring as Till’s grandmother, Alma Carthan, while The Haves and the Have Nots star Danielle Deadwyler will play Till-Mobley herself.
The film will lend focus on Mobley-Till’s journey, seeing things from here perspective following the horrific murder of Emmett Louis Till, her 14-year-old son in 1955 during a family vacation. He was kidnapped from his family’s home, beaten, mutilated, shot in the head, and then his body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River by Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam. Roy’s wife, 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, accused Till of flirting with her at a local grocery store.
The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted in September 1955, an all-white jury who found Bryant and Milam not guilty of Till’s kidnapping and murder drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States.
His mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s
prevented his death from being swept under the carpet like another statistics by keeping the coffin open at the funeral the world could see the tortured and mutilated body of her child.
Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement
Nigerian filmmaker Chinonye Chukwu serves as the writer/director with a producing team composed of Keith Beauchamp, Barbara Broccoli, Thomas K. Levine, Michael J P Reilly, and Frederick Zollo.
Filming is set to begin in September in Atlanta.
According to the report, Chukwu wrote the screenplay based on a previous draft by Beauchamp, based in part on the original research for his award-winning 2005 documentary Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.
“We have waited a very long time to bring this historically necessary important film to people,” said Goldberg. “And as we watch the repression of American History when it comes to people of color it makes it even that more important. I couldn’t be with better people: Fred, Barbara, Chinonye, Keith, Michael, and Danielle.”
“It is a gift to learn the legacy and intimacies of our ancestors, those familial and communal, as is the life of Mamie Till-Mobley, a public leader and mother of the movement,” shared Deadwyler, adding, “I am charged with humility and great will to embody her life at such an integral moment of personal tragedy and political rebellion, a boon to the civil rights movement, and to represent the joy in the love and life shared between Mamie Till and her beloved Emmett Till.”
In “The Blood of Emmett Till,” a book by the historian Timothy Tyson, Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman who accused Emmett of assaulting her, admitted she lied.
Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam, both now dead, were acquitted, though they later confessed to the murder in an article in Look magazine in 1956.
