Taraji P. Henson Set To Produce & Star In Emmett Till Movie

ChristianNews

Taraji P. Henson is bringing us a movie based on the murder of Emmett Till.

Taraji, who made the announcement during an interview with Global Grind is teaming up with director, John Singleton on the film.

We don’t have a start date yet, but the deal definitely has been done. That’s one [film] that I’ve been passionate about since Trayvon Martin was murdered.”

The actress will portray Till’s mother, the late Mamie Till-Mobley, in the tentatively titled The Emmett Till Story. The collaboration between Taraji and Singleton has been in the developmental rumor mill for some time, and looks like it’s finally going to happen.

Via The History Channel:

While visiting family in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier. His assailants–the white woman’s husband and her brother–made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river.

Till grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, and though he had attended a segregated elementary school, he was not prepared for the level of segregation he encountered in Mississippi