The Untold Story of Emmett Till Presented by The Sabira Cole Film Festival

Money, Mississippi, 1955 — Emmett Louis Till, a fourteen-year-old black youth from Chicago visiting family in the Delta, was slain. Abducted by two white men, severely beaten, and finally thrown into the Tallahatchie River, Emmett Till was murdered for one of the oldest forbidden taboos in America’s history: addressing a white woman in public. The murderers were later arrested, but were acquitted in a court of law by an all-white, all male jury.  Emmett did not die in vain.  In this documentary directed by Keith Beauchamp, a family’s agony is finally told through eye-witness accounts of the Till case from the people who were there.

The screening concludes with a live post-film discussion and audience Q&A with director Keith Beauchamp and journalist and activist Herb Boyd.

Keith Beauchamp is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn whose investigation into the murder of Emmett Till, fifty years after Till’s death, led to the reopening of the case by the United States Department of Justice in May 2004. In 1996 Beauchamp started his research, and found microfilm of articles which listed witness who had not been questioned by police, and references to uncharged participants in the murder, besides J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who were found not guilty of Till’s murder, but later publicly confessed. Researching and creating the film took nine years.

Herb Boyd is a journalist, activist, professor and author or editor of twenty-three books, including his latest, The Diary of Malcolm X, edited with Ilyasah Al-Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter.  He teaches African American history and culture at the City College of New York in Harlem, where he lives.