USA / 2005 / 70mins / Documentary, History / English

This documentary presents a sobering reminder of the racial tensions that gripped America not so long ago. In Mississippi during the '50s, a black teenager named Emmett Louis Till, who is from Chicago and visiting his great-uncle, whistles at a white woman in public. Not too long afterward, he is kidnapped and murdered. The filmmakers revisit the public outrage that follows, revealing Till's family as being particularly brave for standing up to white racism when it was clearly unsafe to do so.

Keith Beauchamp

Keith Beauchamp, born 1972, is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn who investigated the murder of Emmett Till, fifty years after Till's death in 1955. Beauchamp's research eventually led him to create the documentary film The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, and the reopening of the case by the United States Department of Justice in May 2004. Beauchamp first encountered the Emmett Till story at age ten while looking through an issue of Jet magazine. Beauchamp says that he almost suffered a similar fate to Till in 1989. He states that as a young man at a dance in a Louisiana nightclub a doorman/bouncer accosted him for dancing with a white girl. According to Beauchamp, an undercover police officer then dragged him outside where he was beaten, before being taken to a police station where he was handcuffed to a chair and beaten further. He says that the abuse only stopped when the police realized that Beauchamp was close friends with the son of a sheriff's department major. Beauchamp is involved in other film work but credits the Untold Story with occupying and shaping his life in a major way, and his relationship with Mamie Till, Emmett mother's, with inspiring him to create the film. His story was featured in various television shows including 60 Minutes with Ed Bradley. Learn More