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American Experience - The Murder of Emmett Till [VHS]

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In its 16-year run, the weekly prime-time TV series AMERICAN EXPERIENCE has been airing high-quality documentaries on wide-ranging subjects concerning American history. Notable shows include "The Battle over Citizen Kane," "The Donner Party," "The Quiz Show Scandal," "America and the Holocaust," the Oscar-nominated "Daughter from Danang," and the many great shows on American presidents and politics.

"The Murder of Emmett Till", first aired in January 2003, is one of the series' best. With film footage, photographs, interviews, and an effective narration by actor Andre Braugher, the 50-minute program tells a harrowing event that, without question, symbolizes the greatest victimization of African Americans during the 1950s. Often unmentioned in history books, the Emmett Till murder took place in an obscure town in Mississippi shortly before the Civil Rights movement gained full momentum. A black teenager from Chicago allegedly whistled at a white woman and ended up beaten and shot to death by local bigots. A trial with an all-white jury ensued, and the acquittal of the murderers was a foregone conclusion. Till's mother courageously asked for her son's mutilated corpse to be displayed in public in order to reveal the depth of racism to the world. The murder gained world-wide notoriety, prompting one French journalist to write, "The death of young black man in America isn't worth a whistle."

The film includes newly conducted interviews with Till's mother, Mamie, shortly before her death in January 2003. She and some of Emmett's relatives eloquently recall the fateful events and the social climate at the time. We see contemporary news footage of the murderers, their supporters, and the atmosphere of the trial at that time. We also see the infamous postmortem photo of Till's mutilated face, which is surely one of the most powerful photos from the era of the Civil Rights movement. His face was so badly deformed that Mamie could identify him only from the ring on his finger. There is also the harrowing footage of Till's body being displayed per Mamie's request, and several viewers simply breaks down in great despair.

PBS has set up web pages dedicated to many of the episodes in the series. After viewing the program, be sure to visit http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/ and check out more articles and photos on the Emmett Till murder. There is an extraordinary article that details the notorious confession from the killers. The feedbacks from contemporary readers to that article are also enlightening.

The DVD version was released on February 2004. It is in non-anamorphic widescreen format and stereo sound, and is encoded for Region 1 only. It includes a few minutes of intros and outros before and after the program.

I wasn't born when Emmett Till was murdered, yet this story has always troubled me. Watching this PBS documentary just mesmerized me. I don't understand this kind of hate, that grown men would drag a young boy from his bed and literally beat him to death. And how a legal system or the community could support the white men because they were white and the victim was black. One witness said he heard "beating" and the boy "screaming." I get goose bumps when I think of that... This movie is not for the squeamish, because it deals with the facts without sugarcoating them. I could watch it because I know it really happened. Turning away and burying my head in the sand because its too horrible to accept is why slavery and the brutal treatment of blacks in the long history of this country lasted so long. God-fearing people have got to face history, learn from it, and vow never to allow the bad parts of it to be repeated... Watching this movie with an open heart and mind will convict you to that end.

This films shows the events around the lynching of Emmett Till, a Black teenager from Chicago. Emmett was visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955 when he was tortured and murdered by racists.
This film talks about real history, not the sanitized versions we get in high school and on t.v.

The Murder... provides a thoughtful and soul stirring view of how racial hate destroys individuals and social institutions. At the same time, it is a reminder of the historical nightmares pregnant in America as a result of segregation. Indeed, this film renewed my commitment to be an individual who teaches students about the way African Americans have thrived in the midst of living within and in the blues existence known as racial hate. This is a movie all people need to experience.

This a fantastic documentary! It is well researched and very engaging. Having shown lots of different videos in class over the years this one always gets an overwhelmingly positive response.

A very moving documentary, that made me angry about the abhorrent racism in southern states. This absorbing documentary learnt me, a European, also a lot about how America deals with the dark pages in its history. This is democracy at its best.

This is for all of those people who would like to sanitize our history and make today's young people think that things were just dandy back in the good old days. Some of our more reactionary pundits would like to think that only "treasonous" leftists would dare lob criticism at all the fine traditions that have made the United States the great country that it is today.

Well, tell that to Emmett & Mamie Till. For every Emmett Till that was murdered for no good reason, there are countless anonymous blacks from the south that just vanished into the night (escorted by some white gentlemen), never to be heard from again. It was only because Mamie Till was in Chicago and couldn't be terrorized into silence that we remember the name of Emmett Till today. We cannot forget his name, we must not forget.

The USA can be a great country, but only if we refuse to ignore some of the serious flaws within our culture. A culture that allows a young man to be mutilated the way Till was --- for saying "Hey Baby" --- is a far cry from the "more perfect union" to which our Constitution's preamble alludes. For those people who think that the government interferes too much in how the states conduct their business, take a good long look at the photo's of Till's remains. The federal government's remaining on the sidelines didn't yield very good results back then. If it require's the intrusion of the government to even the playing field, then so be it. If the alternative is more Emmett Tills, I cannot honestly understand how any right-minded person could argue against it.

Watch this documentary to remind yourself again just what the "good old days" could sometimes be, and be on guard against it happening again.

I have read the book that Emmett Till's mother wrote & it was fabulous. This video is a disappointment in comparison to the book.

This is a very touching story i shed a few tears while watching it. It's very heartbreakiing to see what those men did to him, i can imagine what he had to go though with and how he suffered before he died, i think it's low down to want to hurt a child he was just a child. I hope the men that did this to him suffered worst them he did, and carolyn bryant she have to crazy to he wanted her.

This PBS production is a long overdue appreciation of the life the martyred civil rights figure, fourteen year old Chicago resident Emmett Till, down in deeply segregated Mississippi in 1955 at the hands of at least two white men while visiting relatives. Emmett's crime- eyeballing or whistling or some such at a white woman while black. Sounds familiar from other later contexts, right (like today blacks being stopped in white neighborhoods, on the roads by white police, etc.)? For that childish indiscretion, however, Emmett paid with his young life. That these men, his later self-proclaimed killers were "white trash", and considered as such by `gentile' Southern society nevertheless insured that they would not suffer for their crimes. At least not under the Mississippi-style `justice' of the times. They were white. And white was right. Case closed.

This documentary is also is a tribute, a much warranted tribute, to Emmett's mother, the now deceased Mame Till, whose interview clips go a long way to understanding the nature of the case and her lifelong search for justice for her son- somewhere. As pointed out near the end of the film that never really occurred in her lifetime or the lifetimes of Emmett's killers. Along the way the film details the why of that statement; the murder is graphically laid out, the `justice' system in Mississippi is laid bare. The reaction of blacks in Chicago at Emmett's funeral and later at the verdict, as well as those in the South who were just starting to organize for their rights, had a galvanizing issue. As one of the journalist interviewees noted, Emmett's case highlighted that blacks were under attack, knew they were in a life and death struggle and had better start doing something about it. Moreover, this case provided the first solid evidence to the North, blacks and whites alike, that something was desperately wrong with the justice system in the Jim Crow South.

The beginnings of my personal awareness of the central role of the black liberation struggle in any fight for fundamental change in America did not stem from the Till tragedy but rather a little latter from the attempts to integrate the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. This film and many of the interviewees (journalists, an ex-Governor of Mississippi, field hands who witnessed various aspects of Till's abduction and/or the cover up of the murder, Southern white liberals, etc.) point to the Till case as the tip of the iceberg that exploded soon after in the famous Rosa Parks bus incident in Montgomery, Alabama. No matter where you trace the beginnings of the modern civil right movement from, though, in Emmett Till's case there is only conclusion- Nina Simone said it best in her song- "Mississippi Goddam".