The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in August 1955, his horrific beating, and execution with a single bullet are not depicted in the African-American director Shinoe Soko’s Till. In the United States, this crime – a standard case of the lynching of a little boy who dares to put an exclamation mark on a white woman – is so famous that viewers do not need to rewatch it.

His mention is enough to make Americans remember the two white men who grabbed a child in the street – after someone or something, possibly Carolyn Bryan herself, felt the touch of a whistle – tortured him, killed him, and threw his corpse into the river. . They still remember that the killers were acquitted at the infamous mock trial, and a black-and-white photo of them after their acquittal can easily be found on the Internet, in which they pose happily, hugging their wives.

So, Shinoe Suku in “Till” chooses a story about a tragic incident based on the real story of the boy’s mother, Mami Till-Bradley, a teacher and activist who, until the end of her life, demanded justice from the state. Emmett’s mother insisted on an open-casket burial so the world could see her child’s mutilated face, and allowed the photos to be published in Jet magazine to spread the word around the country. Many years later, books and studies were published on the case, one of which is A Letter to Save a Life (published by Polis, 2020) by John Edgar Wideman.

It was this film, which premiered in America in October, that the day before yesterday, US President Joe Biden decided to present to a select audience in the East Room of the White House. In a brief speech shortly before the lights went out and the screening began, he noted, according to the Associated Press, that while some may choose to ignore the country’s history, “only with the truth comes healing and justice.” Biden said he learned that “hate never goes away” and that the only thing stopping it is the nation’s collective condemnation. “There is only one thing stopping this: all of us,” Biden said. “Silence is complicity.”

A symbolic screening of the film on the Emmett Till case was organized by the President of the United States.

Among the guests, in addition to the director, the film’s star and Whoopi Goldberg, who plays a small role as Emmett’s grandmother but is also a co-producer, was Till’s family. Among them is Emmett’s cousin, who filed a lawsuit in federal court to force the Mississippi County Sheriff’s Office to serve a newly discovered arrest warrant dated 1955 for nearly 90-year-old Carolyn Brian Donham.

That summer, Till left Chicago for Mississippi to visit relatives. Evidence shows that the woman who accused him of molesting her at a grocery store in the small village of Mani pointed Till to the two men who later killed him. An arrest warrant was issued, but the county sheriff told reporters at the time that he didn’t want to “bother” her as she was raising two young children.

Weeks after Till’s body was found, Roy Bryant, Donham’s first husband, and J. Milam’s half-brother were tried for the murder and acquitted by an all-white jury. A few months later, they pleaded guilty in a paid interview with Look magazine. The torture and murder of Till in the Mississippi Delta was the catalyst for the civil rights movement in the mid-1950s.

Last March, Biden signed a law called “Till” that makes lynching a federal hate crime. Congress first considered such legislation over 120 years ago.