Filmmaker Keith A. Beauchamp, who worked on the 2022 drama “Till,” about the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi, answers a question from Falcon Mickel, a Chaney High School freshman.

YOUNGSTOWN — The Aug. 28, 1955, kidnapping and brutal lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, might have occurred nearly 69 years ago, but the tragic story continues to reverberate — and many of the same conditions that led to the crime still permeate our society, a prominent filmmaker says.

“What happened to Emmett Till is a mirror image of what’s happening today,” Keith A. Beauchamp, who co-wrote and co-produced the 2022 Gotham Award-winning drama, “Till,” said.

At the invitation of Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past, Beauchamp spoke to Chaney High School students and faculty Tuesday afternoon about the film — and the power he insists young people today have to bring about needed social change and stand up to injustices.

Beauchamp, 53, who attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, recalled for the students that at age 10, he was in his parents’ study and saw a copy of the issue of Jet magazine in which Emmett’s mangled and bloated body was shown.

“I couldn’t understand this level of hate,” Beauchamp said.

The find led to a discussion with his mother and father in which they told their young son the Emmett Till story as they understood it, he said.

In August 1955, Emmett had taken a train from his Chicago home to visit relatives in Money, Mississippi. Beforehand, his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, had warned her son, who had a proclivity for being a prankster and loved to tell jokes, that he could get into serious trouble if he acted that way in the segregated South, especially around white people.

One day during his stay, Emmett and a few of his cousins stopped by the Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in the tiny town, which Roy Bryant and his wife, Carolyn Bryant, ran. There, Emmett wolf-whistled at Carolyn Bryant, who was behind the counter.

A few days later, her husband, Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam, came to the home of Emmett’s uncle, Mose Wright, where Emmett was sleeping, then, at gunpoint, kidnapped the child around 2 a.m. A few days later, a fisherman found Emmett’s disfigured and bloated body in the Tallahatchie River with a 75-pound cotton gin with barbed wire laced to his neck to hold him down.

Bryant and Milam were charged in Emmett’s murder, but an all-white, all-male jury found the men innocent of the crime after 67 minutes of deliberations – much of which the jurors spent on a soda break. The entire trial was “a farce,” Beauchamp said.

In January 1956, an interviewer named William Bradford Huie, with Look magazine, got the two men to confess to the killing — each of whom was paid between $3,000 and $4,000 for telling their stories, Beauchamp noted.

The Till case, which many believe was pivotal in launching the modern civil rights movement, did have enormous ramifications beyond Mississippi. It was an influential catalyst in Rosa Parks’ refusal to relinquish her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, for which she was arrested Dec. 1, 1955, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s decision to lead the Montgomery bus boycott, Beauchamp said.

Another pivotal point in Beauchamp’s life came in 1989, when a white undercover police officer in Louisiana assaulted him for dancing with a white classmate at a social gathering. Even though he was not charged, Beauchamp was handcuffed to a chair and beaten, something that propelled his determination to fight racism and injustices, he said.

The filmmaker became immersed in further investigating the Till killing and, in so doing, has spent about 30 years tracking down and speaking to witnesses who had never discussed the case openly. He conducted extensive research and became close friends with Emmett’s mother, who he affectionately refers to as “Mother Mobley.”

Mobley, who died in 2003 at age 81, insisted on an open casket for her son as a way to dramatize the evils of hate and racism, and that he be buried in Chicago. Simeon Booker, the first black reporter for the Washington Post and who had ties to Youngstown, wrote the story for Jet.

Even though she became famous for taking that stance, Mobley remained an activist the rest of her life, Beauchamp said.

The “Till” film was the partial fulfillment of a promise to Mobley that he would continue to tell her son’s tragic story in schools as a way to educate especially young people about Emmett and other civil rights foot soldiers – many of whom weren’t much older than today’s high school students. As heartbreaking and disturbing as Emmett’s story may be, it needs to be told, much like the heroic story of Anne Frank during World War II, he continued.

In his research, Beauchamp learned that shortly before Emmett’s kidnapping and murder, Roy Bryant had roughed up two black teenagers — one in the store and another who was walking along a country road and was forced into a truck — before Carolyn Bryant told her husband that neither of them was the one who had whistled at her.

Beauchamp noted that about 14 people, including five blacks, were complicit or had some part in the crime. They included two black men named Henry Lee Loggins and Levi “Too Tight” Collins, who had lived together, along with Loggins’ wife, at the time.

According to the Emmett Till Memory Project, in September 1955, James Hicks, a reporter with a black newspaper who was preparing to cover Milam and Bryant’s trial, received a tip from a woman who claimed Collins was with Emmett the night of his killing but had not been seen since.

Following the tip, Hicks drove to a juke joint in Glendora, Mississippi, where he met a woman who turned out to be Loggins’ wife. She alleged to Hicks that her husband and Collins worked on the Milam plantation in another town, and that he had them assist with Emmett’s abduction and murder. She also claimed the two eyewitnesses had been placed in jail to keep them from testifying at the trial, Beauchamp said.

“The fact that Collins and Loggins were involved in the murder puts the lie to the story pedaled by Look magazine,” according to the Emmett Till Memory Project. “That story – the story which dominated the memory of Emmett Till for the majority of the century – restricted the murder party to the two people who had already been acquitted (J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant), and placed the site of the murder near Glendora, on the banks of the Tallahatchie River.

“The story Hicks discovered at King’s Place (the juke joint) challenges these conclusions: It suggests more people were involved than simply those who were tried …”

Beauchamp got Loggins to agree to an interview, though Loggins never admitted his culpability, the filmmaker recalled. Loggins died in 2009 without having been charged in the case.

It’s vital that today’s young people tap into their inherent power to nonviolently fight to make positive social changes and become activists to right today’s societal wrongs, even though activism often “is not a sprint, but a marathon,” Beauchamp said. Too often, people become temporarily immersed in activism only “when an injustice is at their front door,” he added.

“I keep saying, ‘We’re not angry enough,'” Beauchamp said, referring to the fact that healthful anger often is the essential fuel for constructive activism.

Such action is vital also against a backdrop of today’s political efforts to restrict the type of history that can be taught, he said.

Also during his presentation, Beauchamp showed a 15-minute video that showed certain behind-the-scenes aspects to making the film. Great efforts were made to capture the bright colors and clothing styles from the 1950s, he said.

Originally, Beauchamp studied criminal justice to become a civil rights attorney but changed course after the 1989 incident with the undercover officer.

In 1997, he relocated to Brooklyn, New York, and found work with Big Baby Films, for which he wrote and produced music videos while conducting his research on Till. Two years later, he founded Till Freedom Come Productions, dedicated to socially significant projects.

He also created a documentary titled “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” which played a significant role in getting the U.S. Department of Justice to reopen the case in May 2004. One year later, Emmett’s body was exhumed in Chicago, and in 2006, the FBI turned over its evidence to Mississippi’s district attorney.

In February 2007, however, a grand jury refused to issue any indictments.

Nevertheless, the case was again reopened in 2017, with a focus on Carolyn Bryant’s possible culpability, but was closed in 2021 with no arrests. She died April 25, 2023, at age 88.

Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past hosted a showing of the film “Till” on Tuesday evening at Youngstown State University’s Williamson College of Business Administration.

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