When the Oscars are handed out Sunday at the 95th Academy Awards, the film Till won’t be recognized.
As it turns out, some of the most noticeable Oscar-nominated omissions this year are films made by and starring Black women. Till tells the story through the eyes of Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett, the Black Chicago teenager who was lynched by white men in 1955 while on a visit to Money, Mississippi.
Many people in Mississippi have wanted justice for Emmett Till — in the courts and on the big screen. The small historically Black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi is doing its part. There is a museum honoring Till, featuring items from the ABC miniseries, “Women of the Movement.” The series centered on the activism of Mamie Till, which helped spark the Civil Rights Movement.
Herman Johnson, Jr. is Director and Co-founder of the Mound Bayou Museum. He helped organize a screening of the movie Till at the former John F. Kennedy High School, home of the museum.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Johnson: "A lot of people don’t know about how much the role Mound Bayou played in that whole movie. We talked about the fact that the only place that Mamie Till could be safe when she came to Mississippi was in Mound Bayou. Because of the fact that Mound Bayou was more like a “Sanctuary City.” It was all Black, run by Blacks, everything here was Black and it was a prosperous place."
Inge: "And she couldn’t stay in Sumner, Mississippi, where the trial was."
Johnson: "Exactly. She couldn’t stay in the next town over. She couldn’t stay in Glendora. She could not stay in any of the cities in Tallahatchie County — she probably would have been killed. Matter of fact, she was targeted even though she was here in Mound Bayou. She was not only safe here, but she was familiar with Mound Bayou because she had relatives here. So, there are still people here who talk about her visiting them. And matter of fact, at the museum, we are recording some of those people to put on our site that knew her, that talk about her visiting them here."
Inge: "Tell me about the man that opened his home to Mamie Till and members of the Black press."
Johnson: "Well, that was Dr. Howard, Dr. T.R.M. Howard who was chief surgeon at the hospital, the Taborian Hospital, here in Mound Bayou. He was a very, very aggressive Civil Rights leader along with the fact that he was the chief surgeon at the hospital. He was in the national press where he went against J. Edgar Hoover as far as in the Civil Rights Movement. But in the role that he played in the Emmett Till trial, matter of fact, my father, he believes that the Emmett Till story would not have the national attention that it has now if it had not been for T.R.M. Howard. There was a series of events that happened that my father recounts, that T.R.M. Howard called his friend Charles Diggs in Michigan. Charles Diggs calls a friend of his that he knew, a white guy who was the attorney general of Indiana. The attorney general of Indiana happened to know the attorney general of Mississippi. And that guy, of course, knew the sheriff over in Tallahatchie County and ordered him not to bury that body."
Inge: "Is the T.R.M. Howard home still here?"
Johnson: "The house that he lived in is not there. The house behind it — there were some smaller homes that his servants lived in. And I am not really sure if they are still there. But what we would like to do is build a replica home next to it. The press and the moviemakers are depicting it as a grand, grand home with a pool and the whole thing. And they have the upstairs and the downstairs and the maids and the whole thing. And he did have a grand home. They used a plantation home over in Greenwood when they shot the “Women of the Movement” series. We would like something like that to depict that because a lot of people who visit Mound Bayou come and look for that home and are disappointed that they don’t have anything to go to."
Inge: "I want to know, maybe you can walk around and show me some of these props from the TV movie. Wow, I see the living room."
Johnson: "What happened was, one of the actresses that was working on the set, her name is Iman Ali, she was the stand-in for the Mamie Till character, Adrienne Warren. She happened to be born in Mound Bayou, she was two years old when she left. Being proud of the fact that she was born in Mound Bayou, after she thought about it for a while, she called back and asked if we would like the props from the movie. So, she went and talked to some people there and the next thing you know, they made it happen."
Inge: "Wow. I want to walk back here because, you have definitely an important piece back here that was used in the TV movie. And this is the body."
Johnson: "Well, when they gave us the props, two of the props that were in that movie was the bodies that were used in that movie. When they first find Emmett Till they find him with a ring on his finger. They find his leg sticking out of the river. And there is a scene when Mamie Till is in the morgue when she first sees her son. And they use a body for that. We have that body. And what I also want to say, we have been in discussions with the Smithsonian African American Museum and they have assured us that they will send some curators down here to help us totally to prepare people for seeing that body because the body looks pretty gruesome."
Inge: "A lot of people don’t know how important the Emmett Till story is to Mound Bayou. Even though it may seem like a small part in a small role, but Mound Bayou is very proud of the role it played in protecting Mamie Till."
Johnson: "Absolutely. And it embodies the nature of Mound Bayou because we were a protector. We know that the Emmett Till story is an embodiment or what happened to Black Americans all around the country."
Till is available to stream online via Amazon Prime and YouTube.
