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Emmett Till documentary
Jun. 6th, 2005 05:29 pmSo I watched a documentary (of sorts) about Emmett Till, one of my Netflix DVDs. Below, the review I wrote for Netflix:
This is not a true documentary as it's a little short (it's part of PBS's American Experience series), but it's a good introduction to an horrific episode in American history. It's difficult for younger Americans to appreciate just how brutal the Southern way of life was for blacks before civil rights, and Mississippi was the worst. It's truly unfathomable that grown men could somehow justify kidnapping, beating and murdering a young boy, and that a jury could find them innocent despite overwhelming evidence. (The two men later confessed to Look magazine, and of course were protected by double jeopardy.) Emmett Till's murder could've been swept under the rug, but his mother decided to have an open casket viewing, and Jet magazine ran photos of the body. The pictures galvanized the world, and the spark was lit for righteous Americans of all colors to try to change the unwritten code of black persecution. As said, it's a little short on details--the PBS website has some good features that flesh the case out a little. Good interviews, and the contextual information is useful. Be warned, there are some upsetting pictures of lynchings and Emmett Till's body (which are necessary to appreciate the brutality of this system). This is a story that needs to be told over and over--we have made a great deal of progress but the lynchings of Matthew Shepherd and James Byrd demonstrate we are not there yet.
PBS also has some great supplementary materials on their website about this incident. One of my questions was since the murderers confessed after the trial, why didn't the Federal authorities pursue the case? Even if they couldn't be tried again for murder, they could've been tried for other things, including the attempt to deprive him of his civil rights (the Civil Rights Act, albeit not passed until '64, was based on the 14th Amendment, I believe). Someone posted just such a question to the panel, and one panelist responded:
The Justice Department did claim to do some kind of investigation in 1955, issuing a statement that it was looking into whether Till's civil rights had been violated. Nothing came of it, obviously. The president [i.e., Eisenhower] was always reluctant to "interfere" in the South, and [J. Edgar] Hoover was clearly hostile to African Americans, but this alone doesn't explain the feds failure to respond. There simply were no federal investigations into lynchings at the time--at least no serious, thorough investigations. When Mack Charles Parker was lynched four years later, the FBI investigated but no one was prosecuted.
This is not a true documentary as it's a little short (it's part of PBS's American Experience series), but it's a good introduction to an horrific episode in American history. It's difficult for younger Americans to appreciate just how brutal the Southern way of life was for blacks before civil rights, and Mississippi was the worst. It's truly unfathomable that grown men could somehow justify kidnapping, beating and murdering a young boy, and that a jury could find them innocent despite overwhelming evidence. (The two men later confessed to Look magazine, and of course were protected by double jeopardy.) Emmett Till's murder could've been swept under the rug, but his mother decided to have an open casket viewing, and Jet magazine ran photos of the body. The pictures galvanized the world, and the spark was lit for righteous Americans of all colors to try to change the unwritten code of black persecution. As said, it's a little short on details--the PBS website has some good features that flesh the case out a little. Good interviews, and the contextual information is useful. Be warned, there are some upsetting pictures of lynchings and Emmett Till's body (which are necessary to appreciate the brutality of this system). This is a story that needs to be told over and over--we have made a great deal of progress but the lynchings of Matthew Shepherd and James Byrd demonstrate we are not there yet.
PBS also has some great supplementary materials on their website about this incident. One of my questions was since the murderers confessed after the trial, why didn't the Federal authorities pursue the case? Even if they couldn't be tried again for murder, they could've been tried for other things, including the attempt to deprive him of his civil rights (the Civil Rights Act, albeit not passed until '64, was based on the 14th Amendment, I believe). Someone posted just such a question to the panel, and one panelist responded:
The Justice Department did claim to do some kind of investigation in 1955, issuing a statement that it was looking into whether Till's civil rights had been violated. Nothing came of it, obviously. The president [i.e., Eisenhower] was always reluctant to "interfere" in the South, and [J. Edgar] Hoover was clearly hostile to African Americans, but this alone doesn't explain the feds failure to respond. There simply were no federal investigations into lynchings at the time--at least no serious, thorough investigations. When Mack Charles Parker was lynched four years later, the FBI investigated but no one was prosecuted.
