UNWRITTEN CODE OF CONDUCT

LYNCHING TRIGGERS US CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The trip to the Mississippi Delta begins in Chicago with the exchange of a watch between mother and son saying their sweet good-byes on the train platform.

Director Chinonye Chukwu uses timed train travel as a metaphor for a narrative about the subconscious of racial politics in America during the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Summer of 1955, in Till (2022).

The 14-year old boy heading down into the Deep South to visit family is Emmett Till.

Till works the cotton fields with his cousins during the day and spends time in town with them at night during a two week summer vacation.

But after just one week the charismatic teenager from an educated middle class family in Chicago says the wrong thing to and looks the wrong way at a white housewife managing the family convenience store. 

Jalyn Hall shows the innocence of Till in speaking to white folk in a manner meant only as a compliment.

But convenience store manager Carolyn Bryant, played by Haley Bennett, does not intend to forget the comment of a black boy to a white woman, who then also wolf-calls her in admiration for her movie star looks.

Till’s mother, Mamie, played by Danielle Deadwyler, had warned her son about the unwritten code of conduct in the Deep South that would be different than the city life.

Deadwyler shows how her middle class family of a World War II veteran is no different than any other family and that boys will be boys. 

But soon enough, the extrajudicial violence of whites on blacks shows up at her cousin’s door to come get Till. Till was lynched on August 28, 1955.

Chukwu uses a score, composed by Abel Korzeniowski, over top of scenes of innocence, about an  innocent black family and an innocent black teenage boy in the white ruled Deep American South.

In a grief scene, when Mamie finally accepts that her young son Emmett has been killed in a lynching, Chukwu uses the score with close camera work and emotive acting performances to make the audience feel the grief and injustice.

The film narrative gets pushed along from time to time with creative aesthetics such as black women getting together for a game of cards, while the camera pans around the circular table catching the cigarette smoke moving across the playing surface.

One scene in the funeral parlor gradually becomes a magazine cover published on September 15, 1955.

Whoopie Goldberg stars in and produces this narrative about how the Civil Rights Movement was started in fits and starts and example by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

Black Americans needed help fighting through the learned helplessness instilled from slavery and 300 years of violent subjugation.

In the far background is a young Medgar Evers, the first Field Secretary in Mississippi for the NAACP stationed there to dismantle segregation and assist blacks in enforcing voting rights. Evers would be assassinated in 1963.

The film drives home the singular powerful message about lynching. But the script misses the many nuances about being black in white America. And the film is deficient in sub-plots and a bit of character development as a result. 

Till is streaming in Canada on Apple TV.