I finally sat down this past weekend and binged episodes 3-6 of ABC’s Women of the Movement, which was both set and shot on location here in the Delta.
The series tells the story of the kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1954.
Visiting from Chicago that summer, Till, an African American, was kidnapped and murdered by Roy Bryant and his brother-in-law JW Milam after it was alleged the child made advances toward Bryant’s wife, Carolyn at their family store in Money.
Bryant and Milam faced murder charges in Tallahatchie County and stood trial that summer, but an all-white jury acquitted the pair after less than an hour of deliberation.
Bryant and Milam later confessed to the kidnapping and murder in an article in Look magazine, although many of the details they gave to the publication have come under recent scrutiny.
Women of the Movement does a masterful job of capturing the setting.
The script was stellar, and the acting superb.
The story mainly revolves around Till’s mother, Mrs. Mamie Till-Mobley, and her fight for justice for her son.
It would have been easy for Hollywood to portray many of the story’s characters as one-dimensional monsters, but that wasn’t the case.
The show’s writers did portray the horrors of the segregated South, while at the same time shining light on the complicated and multi-layered nature of the Jim Crow system.
The most surprising part was that the show’s creators chose to somewhat humanize Roy and Carolyn Bryant.
JW Milam was portrayed as the monster behind the physical kidnapping and murder of Till, while Roy Bryant’s character seemed reluctant, egged on by Milam.
Later, Roy and Carolyn Bryant seem regretful, although selfishly, because the entire world, including many racist whites in their community saw Till’s murder as savage and evil.
The show, however, stops short of portraying remorse, something neither of the two showed as they lied to cover their sins and convince the jury that she was a victim of Till’s alleged sexual advances.
Another interesting facet of the show was the thread, driven mostly by recent fresh looks at the murder, that Till was murdered in Sunflower County instead of Tallahatchie, where the murder trial took place.
Some would argue that productions like Women of the Movement serve only to reopen old woulds.
But Till’s murder is a wound on the soul of this state that has never closed.
Roy Bryant and JW Milam walked free from the murder trial. They never faced kidnapping charges in Leflore County, and Carolyn Bryant never faced a reckoning for the apparent lies she told to free her husband and brother-in-law.
The only solace taken from the story is that Till did not die in vain.
He inspired Rosa Parks to protest in Montgomery, Fannie Lou Hamer to register to vote and countless others to join the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s.
