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Please join us for a screening of "The Murder of Emmett Till: The Brutal Killing that Mobilized the Civil Rights Movement."
MacArthur Foundation Genius Fellow and director Stanley Nelson will be on hand for questions and discussion.
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Carolina Theater 108 E. Franklin St. Chapel Hill 7 pm
Do you know the story of Emmett Till?
In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old black boy whistled at a white woman in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Emmett Till, a teen from Chicago, didn't understand that he had broken the unwritten laws of the Jim Crow South until three days later, when two white men dragged him from his bed in the dead of night, beat him brutally and then shot him in the head. Although his killers were arrested and charged with murder, they were both acquitted quickly by an all-white, all-male jury. Shortly afterwards, the defendants sold their story, including a detailed account of how they murdered Till, to a journalist. The murder and the trial horrified the nation and the world. Till's death was a spark that helped mobilize the civil rights movement. Three months after his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, the Montgomery bus boycott began.
This event is co-sponsored by the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History and the Political Action Committee of
the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill chapter of the NAACP.
This event is free and open to the public.
For more information, visit us online or call.
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