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TITLE: FREEDOM'S
CHILD |
WGA
Registration #: 1072566 |
Log
Line: |
Summary: When
deciding how to approach this story of human heartbreak we
decided not to approach it from the traditional narrative
that would involve the depiction of a sham trial of the two
men who perpetrated this horrible crime. What sane human
compassionate human being would not believe that J.D. Milam
and Roy Bryant killed this little black boy simply because
he admired the beauty of a white woman.... The evidence
was overwhelming that they killed and from a human point
of view got away with it. The answer, of course, would be
very few. And it is too horrible a thought to know that injustice
triumphed over all that is good and fair forever… It
would be too heartbreaking to admit that the story of his
tragic death and all that it stood for would be lost to the
ages. For what help would it do for the human heart to relive
Emmett’s story in that way… Again and again
and finally again. And who would want to listen or watch?
So we decided to tell Emmett’s story in a different
way. We decided to try and tell it from what we think might
have been Heaven’s point of view… We determined
to depict Emmett’s story through eyes and feelings
of another kind of being… A half human very troubled
guardian angel name Malcolm who watched over Emmett Louis
Till… An angel who too has a hard time grasping the
tough, sometimes cruel love of the human experience…
Big Milam ordered Bobo to pick up the fan. He staggered under its weight... carried it to the river bank. They stood silently... just hating one another. Milam: "Take off your clothes." Slowly, Bobo pulled off his shoes, his socks. He stood up, unbuttoned his shirt, dropped his pants, his shorts. He stood there naked. It was Sunday morning, a little before 7.Milam: "You still as good as I am?" Bobo: "Yeah." Milam: "You still 'had' white women?" Bobo: "Yeah." That big .45 jumped in Big Milam's hand. The youth turned to catch that big, expanding bullet at his right ear. He dropped. They barb-wired the gin fan to his neck, rolled him into 20 feet of water.Excerpt from The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi...In August 1955, a fourteen-year-old Chicago black boy named Emmett Louis Till Jr. went to visit relatives near Money, Mississippi. Intelligent and bold, with a slight mischievous streak, Emmett Till had experienced segregation in his hometown of Chicago, but he was unaccustomed to the severe segregation he encountered in Mississippi. When he showed some local boys a picture of a white girl who was one of his friends back home and bragged that she was his girlfriend, one of them said, "Hey, there's a [white] girl in that store there. I bet you won't go in there and talk to her." Emmett went in and bought some candy. As he left, he said "Bye baby" to Carolyn Bryant, the wife of the storeowner. Although they were worried at first about the incident, the boys soon forgot about it. A few days later, two men came to the cabin of Mose Wright, Emmett's uncle, in the middle of the night. Roy Bryant, the owner of the store, and J.W. Milam, his brother-in-law, drove off with Emmett. Three days later, Emmett Till's body was found in the Tallahatchie River. One eye was gouged out, and his crushed-in head had a bullet in it. The corpse was nearly unrecognizable; Emmett’s Uncle Mose Wright could only positively identify the body as Emmett's because it was wearing an initialed ring… The two men, who were tried for the murder and acquitted, later confessed to a magazine writer named William Bradford Huie who wrote a article for Look Magazine entitled The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi… The national outrage of Emmett’s brutal murder eventually led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Martin Luther King and all the historical events that followed thereafter in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1950s. |