By Stacey Patton

August 28th marks the 55th anniversary of the brutal murder of 14 year-old Emmett Louis Till. In the summer of 1955 he was forced out of his bed in the middle of the night at gunpoint by white men, thrown on the back of a pick-up truck and driven to a barn where he was beaten, castrated, and shot. His crime – whistling at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant, the wife a Mississippi grocery store owner.

Earlier that night another boy named Preston Scott was snatched up off a road. His teeth were knocked out before he was thrown onto the back of that same truck. A light was shined his face. “That’s the wrong nigger,” said Carolyn Bryant.

That boy was let go.

Till’s badly beaten, mutilated body was eventually found in the Tallahatchie River and the main suspects were acquitted by an all-white jury. They later admitted to killing the teen in a magazine interview.

Brooklyn filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, wasn’t even alive when Till was murdered. But he’s been obsessed with the facts of the case for years. And on this anniversary, he’s still haunted.

Beauchamp sat down for an interview with The Defenders Online to talk about his powerful documentary on the Till case and how he single-handedly tracked down witnesses and gathered enough evidence to get the case reopened. He talked about how he brokered his current relationship with the FBI and is now producing a television series with CBS called The Injustice Diaries which chronicles the investigations into unsolved civil rights era murders. Beauchamp also his thoughts on recent criticism about the scant progress being made by the federal government’s Cold Case Initiative that was set up in 2007 to solve old racial killings.

A Haunting Face

Beauchamp, who grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was 10 when he first heard of Emmett Till’s murder.

“I was in my parent’s study looking through old vintage issues of JET Magazine,” he said. “On one side of the magazine there was this angelic looking face of a black boy and then on the other side there was this face of what I thought was a monster.”

That face, the angel and the monster, was Emmett Till.

Till’s mother had insisted on a public funeral and allowed JET to publish a graphic cover photo of her son’s crushed, gray and swollen face and punched in skull lying in a casket. She wanted the world to see the brutality of southern white racism. That same photo was hung on telephone poles throughout the streets of Chicago.

“I was startled,” said Beauchamp, recalling his boyhood horror.

When his parents walked by the study and saw his reaction, they delicately explained the story of Till’s murder as best as any parent in that situation could. Even during Beauchamp’s childhood, there still weren’t a lot of facts widely known about what had transpired back in the summer of 1955. No one had thoroughly separated myths from facts.

“My parents said a little black kid was murdered for talking fresh to a white woman. Unfortunately, he lost his life for not knowing his place in the South,” said Beauchamp. “I was shocked because I had never heard a story like this before. I had heard about the murders of older people in the civil rights era. But this was a kid like myself. Could this happen to me?”

The name Emmett Till kept resurfacing in the Beauchamp household during his teens. The innocence of black boy long shattered, and a life extinguished years before would light a fire in Beauchamp. But little did he know that he would grow up to exhume a legal and journalistic grave, in a metaphorical sense. But first, like so many black boys who grew in the South during the Jim Crow era, Beauchamp would need to experience his own late 20th century version racial awakening.

“Mess With Your Own Kind”

“I was dating interracially,” said Beauchamp, whose family lived in a predominantly white area where residents weren’t accepting of black-white intimacies. “My parents kept saying don’t let what happened to Till happen to you.”

Beauchamp’s parents issued warnings not because they were opposed to interracial dating. They just wanted their son to be clear that people in that part of the South weren’t so open minded.

Beauchamp didn’t heed his mother’s warnings. It was 1989. Times had changed, he thought. It wasn’t the Old South. He was a free spirit. He had had a white girlfriend, openly dated, and danced with plenty of white girls at local parties. But an ugly incident at a Baton Rouge nightclub would change his life forever.

Two weeks before his graduation from Baker High School, Beauchamp and a bunch of classmates attended a pre-graduation party at a club called 2010. A group of white girls invited him on the floor to dance. A bouncer pushed him from behind and said, “Nigger, mess with your own kind. Leave these white girls alone.”

Beauchamp pushed back. A fight ensued between him, the bouncer and an undercover police officer. He was then taken to a secluded room in the back of the club, handcuffed to a chair, beaten and kicked in the face.

“I couldn’t feel any pain,” he said, his voice rising because, still charged all these years later with anger at those men. “All I could think about were the warnings my mother gave me. And I thought about Emmett Till and how he was taken into a barn, tortured and killed.”

Beauchamp suffered cuts, bruises and a swollen jaw but made it out of the ordeal with his life. He said it was a traumatic episode in his life. The cop who beat him was eventually thrown off the force beating another man for interracial dating.

That 1989 beating is the reason why Beauchamp has been so obsessed with investigating the murder of Till.

“I was stripped of my dignity, my manhood,” he said. “I want to make sure this never happens to another person of color again. And back then I thought that the best way to combat racism was to get involved with the legal system and civil rights.”

More to the Story

In 1995 after his junior year of college, Beauchamp decided to move to New York City where he was introduced to filmmaking by childhood friends who owned a production company.

“We started making music videos,” he said. “But I wasn’t happy doing that. I didn’t feel like I was giving back to the community. I always wanted to do a film on the Till murder.”

Just before Christmas 1996, Beauchamp traveled to Chicago to meet Till’s mother. When he told her of his plans to make a documentary about her son’s murder, she informed him that there was so much more to the case than what had been written in history books and what the public knew.

Beauchamp spent nearly a decade pouring over old records and interviewing and filming witnesses. He discovered that 12-15 people were involved in the Till’s murder; that a black employee sold the teen out for a 25-cent store credit; that Till did in fact whistle at Carolyn Bryant; that Bryant embellished her story about Till’s sexual advance to make her cheating husband jealous, in addition to a host of other gripping details.

Though Till’s mother died in 2003, Beauchamp pushed on with her dream of pursuing justice for her son and the victims of other old murders. In May 2004, 50 years after Till’s murder helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement, the Justice Department launched an investigation off Beauchamp’s findings which he would later put into his 2005 documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Till.

In February 2007, a grand jury in Leflore County declined to issue an indictment of Carolyn Bryant, the widow of one of the two white men originally acquitted of Till’s death. The grand jury found insufficient evidence existed for an indictment on a criminal charge. She would have been the first white woman ever indicted for a civil rights murder.

Beauchamp says that there couldn’t have been an indictment. “Mississippi can’t set that kind of precedent even today.”

Not J. Edger Hoover’s FBI

Beauchamp notes that lately there’s been talk in the press about the scant progress being made in the government’s efforts to solve old racial killings.

On August 23 The New York Times reported that since the establishment of the federal Cold Case Initiative in 2007, just after the Leflore grand jury decided not to indict Bryant, there have been no federal indictments, very little of the millions of dollars approved by Congress to finance the initiative has materialized, and no agents are assigned to purse the cases full time.

The report also noted that 56 of 109 cases have been closed. More are on the brink of being closed. Victim’s families are frustrated. Suspects are dying.

Beauchamp says that the FBI has been getting beat up for a long time about civil rights cases and he doesn’t think it’s fair.

“A lot of people keep saying that civil rights have been put on the backburner,” he says. “It’s not true. The FBI didn’t have to announce this initiative. People don’t know that before it was even announced it was already being talked about behind the scenes. They could have kept quiet about it. People need to know that this is not your J. Edger Hoover’s FBI. There are a lot of young black agents and progressive white agents holding power positions in the Bureau who really care about these cases.”

The reopening of the Till case raised a great deal of public awareness about other unsolved racial murders of the era. In 2008, the United States Senate passed The Till Bill, a law which established an Unsolved Crimes Section in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, and an Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Investigative Office in the Civil Rights Unit of the FBI.

“Once the Till case was reopened, a lot of people felt it was a ripe moment to start looking at these other unsolved cases,” said Beauchamp. That’s when he started collaborating with the FBI for his knew series The Injustice Diaries which is scheduled to start airing this February in time for Black History Month.

He knows first-hand the difficulties of investigating old racial killings. “People think the FBI can do whatever it wants. But that’s not how it works. Witnesses are scared even decades later. They don’t always come forward to talk to the FBI. That’s why I’m working with the FBI as a secondary resource to help shake the trees.”

Beauchamp says that he and the FBI would love to see a single cold case civil rights division solely devoted to these old murders. “But now, the Bureau has to focus on terrorism and so many other racist things going on this country.”

Stacey Patton is the Senior Editor of The Defenders Online and a writer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.