By Zach Patberg
But it did – to an extent.Speaking to a large crowd in Jamaica Saturday after showing his documentary of the brutal 1955 killing in Mississippi that subsequently galvanized the civil rights movement, the 34-year-old filmmaker recalled a night two weeks before graduating from high school in Louisiana when a plainclothes police officer beat him for dancing with a white woman.”That right there spurred me to do what I'm doing now,” he said.What Beauchamp is doing now is unearthing a racial hate crime that had been buried for 50 years. His documentary, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” convinced the U.S. Justice Department to reopen the case in spring 2004 based on evidence largely supplied by Beauchamp. His findings suggested that at least a dozen people may have been involved in Till's kidnapping, torture and death, including five who are still alive.”Just as Emmett Till was a catalyst in the '50s for civil rights, this film was the catalyst for change now,” said Beauchamp, who showed his documentary at the Jamaica library in honor of Black History Month.Till, who was visiting relatives in Money, Miss., was dragged from his great uncle's house late one night in August 1955 by two white men, one of whose wife claimed Till whistled at her at a grocery store.Three days later, Till's mutilated body was found in the Tallahatchie River, strapped to a cotton gin fan by barbed wire. The two men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were later tried and acquitted by an all-white jury.The Justice Department's revived investigation is expected to produce indictments of five people, Beauchamp said. One of them, Carolyn Bryant, the wife at whom Till supposedly whistled, is suspected of aiding her husband in the kidnapping, he said. She is now 72, remarried and living in Greenville, Miss.”Now we have to keep putting on the pressure to make this right,” Beauchamp said.But several members in the audience Saturday were not satisfied with the progress being made just on the Till case. They wanted Beauchamp to act as a role-model to today's youth and encourage others like rap stars to do the same.”Young people don't know a lot about the struggle,” one man said. “They need an education, and the people who can lead these children are you and the hip-hop community.”Although he considers himself more a movie producer than a documentarian, Beauchamp said he is currently working on one more documentary about 80 or so lynchings in the last decade throughout the country that have been ruled suicides. He is also talking to Hollywood producer Frederick Zollo about turning the Till documentary, which comes out on DVD Feb. 28, into a feature film.”Anybody who can't find something worth dying for doesn't deserve to live,” Beauchamp, in paraphrasing Martin Luther King, said of his passion for the Till case. “I was obligated to tell this story.”Reach reporter Zach Patberg by e-mail at news@timesledger.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 155.
