The gruesome murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till is ingrained in our collective memories. Even now, many of us can close our eyes and see his mangled body lying in his open casket– a sight that his mother Mamie Till demanded that we see. The death of the young boy on a sweltering August day in Mississippi was one of the first sparks of the Civil Rights Movement that would propel an entire race of people forward. Still, we don’t often consider those closest to Emmett, the family members that were unable to protect this young Black man from a heinous and racist world. In his Academy Award-nominated short film My Nephew Emmett, filmmaker Kevin Wilson Jr., revisits that awful night and the calm summer day leading up to it from the perspective of Till’s 64-year-old great-uncle, Mose Wright. Wilson forces us to remember a young boy and his family as ordinary people instead of the symbols that they have become.
A few days after the Oscar nominations were announced, Wilson and I chatted on the phone. Excited but obviously humbled by the honor, we discussed his journey into this story. It began as a play and eventually became a film. More than that, I needed to know why Wilson continued to revisit Emmett Till’s story over and over again. “It’s a story that’s been connected to who I am as a man, as a Black man in America since I was a child,” Wilson explained. “My mother introduced me to his story when I was five-years-old, she showed me a photograph of his mutilated corpse, and she told me, ‘This is a part of your history, this is a part of your ancestry.’ Emmett Till’s story, in particular, intrigued me because when I first wrote the play, I was only a year older than Emmett when he was murdered. I felt that it could have been me, it could have been anyone. I’m from Durham, North Carolina, and I would travel down into the rural parts of North Carolina to visit with my relatives over the summer. We would drive down to those areas, and we would see confederate flags on the way down. It wasn’t very removed from who I was.”
Emmett Till’s life and death didn’t quietly fade into the background as Wison got older. In fact, Emmett remained with him, haunting him even more once he became a parent. “When I got to NYU, I decided to make the short film about it,” he recalled. “The first draft was a script I wrote in April of 2016, and I wrote it in my directing class, which is taught by Kasi Lemmons. I’d just become a father. I thought that the perspective of (Emmett’s) uncle, who was his guardian at the time he was taken, was an interesting one to explore as a parent. I wanted to explore the feelings, the doom and the helplessness that one feels as a parent or a guardian when they have to give up their relative or child, someone that they are responsible for caring for to folks that would do them harm, and the helplessness behind that and the strength you would have to develop to be able to carry on after that tragedy occurs. It’s the same type of strength that Trayvon Martin’s mother had to muster, the same type of strength that Eric Garner’s daughter had to muster, and Michael Brown’s family.”
Finding someone to embody Mose Wright felt nearly insurmountable. Wilson needed someone who would be able to carry the weight and weariness of the Jim Crow South on his face. With the late L.B. Williams as Mose, the legendary Jasmine Guy as his wife Elizabeth Wright, and newcomer Joshua Wright as Emmett, Wilson nailed the casting. “I wanted L.B. Williams, specifically, to play the role,” he said. “I was watching Juice, and there’s this one shot, and this is the only time that L.B. is in this movie — Tupac is getting ready for the day, and he goes into the room to see his father and he puts some money in his father’s pocket. That’s L.B. I knew when I wrote my script that whoever was going to play this role was just going to be sitting and thinking for half the movie, so they would need to actually have a story behind their eyes. I never really had to audition L.B., I called him up, we had coffee, and I would ask him a question and just the way he looked when he was thinking about an answer, I knew that he was the one.
Unfortunately, there was a lot more happening with Williams that Wilson initially suspected. My Nephew Emmett would be his last performance. “Unfortunately, he was dying, he was dying of cancer,” Wilson said quietly. “What you saw in the movie was an actual man anticipating doom —his own passing. We finished the movie in May, and L.B. died in July. He got an opportunity to see the film, and then two months later he was dead, so, in many ways, I think that L.B. gave me a gift, he gave of himself. We were on set 12 hours a day, and he was such a frail man, and you could tell that he was in a lot of pain, but he endured it for the story. That alone just inspired everyone on set, inspired me, and it inspired the entire crew to just push forward for the purpose of telling the story that we’re all passionate about.”
Considering the long list of recent Black deaths in this country, Emmett Till’s story has never been more relevant. The details surrounding the young man’s death have resurfaced recently as well. Carolyn Bryant, the woman who accused the 14-year-old of being sexually aggressive towards her came forward a half-century later to discuss the role she played in his murder. “There’s a big conversation around that, and it’s still a lot of misunderstanding,” Wilson informed me. “What we do know about what happened at the store, is that Emmett, when he came out of the store, he did whistle at her, his cousins admitted that–they all agreed that he whistled. What she lied about was what had happened inside of the store when nobody else was present but her and Emmett. And she lied on the witness stand and said that he touched her waist and said: ‘Bye, baby’ and asked her on a date and all this stuff, and it just perpetuated a lie as if those things were going to excuse the men for what they had done to him. It created this environment where folks were looking at him as this rambunctious kid. This happens today when young men are killed; the police paint them out to be thugs and criminals. Carolyn Bryant spoke with the author Timothy B. Tyson about her feelings of regret and grief, and all that. It’s been frustrating though, to the family. I do feel that she has a lot to answer to.”
Wilson’s Oscar nom will aid in the effort to continue keeping Emmett Till’s legacy alive. My Nephew Emmett will also introduce the world to Mose Wright, the man who bravely named his nephew’s murderers on camera in a time when that was unheard of. For now, Wilson only aims to keep moving forward. “The goal has always been to make feature films and to use every opportunity that I have to make another project,” he expressed. “I’m making a psychological thriller that I’ve written called Blueberry Cove, and it’s about a woman who accidentally kills someone, and it deals with the psychology of committing an accidental murder. I’m really excited about that and other projects that have come my way. Now it’s going to be about exploring all my opportunities and deciding which one I can find myself in the most, which one I’d be most interested in exploring for the next year or two. I’m really blessed and really grateful about that.”
The Academy Awards air March 4, 2018, on ABC.
Aramide A Tinubu is a film critic and entertainment writer. As a journalist, her work has been published in EBONY, JET, ESSENCE, Bustle, The Daily Mail, IndieWire and Blavity. She wrote her Master’s thesis on Black Girlhood and Parental Loss in Contemporary Black American Cinema. She’s a cinephile, bookworm, blogger and NYU + Columbia University alum. You can find her reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, read her blog at: www.chocolategirlinthecity.com or tweet her @midnightrami
