Michael Phillips: The women behind the new movie ‘Till’ knew they had to show a mother living through the unbearable

CHICAGO — Now in theaters, “Till” is the story of a mother, a mother’s son and the horrific 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till, who was visiting relatives in Mississippi at the time of his murder.

The killers were acquitted and lived as free men, long after confessing, proudly, to Look magazine the following year. The decision of Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett’s grieving, quietly galvanized mother, to hold an open-casket funeral for her son, and to allow Chicago’s Jet magazine to publish photographs of Emmett Till’s brutalized body, sparked a civil rights movement. Generations later, the murders of Black citizens continue, sometimes prosecuted, sometimes not. The events dramatized in “Till” point like an invisible arrow to where we