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MOVIES | HISTORY | RACE
The Real Reason Danielle Deadwyler Did Not Receive an Oscar Nod for ‘Till’
Hollywood continues to suffer from bias, but it’s not always the kind you expect.
When Emmett Till was murdered in 1955
I was seven years old and in the first grade. I remember seeing the photograph of his badly beaten face in Jet magazine, the glossy pocket-sized publication that brought news of the Black community to our mailbox every week. Even now, the boy’s face, photographed in a casket, bears little resemblance to anything human.
When I understood that it was not a fake like images of aliens you saw in supermarket tabloids, but a picture of an actual 14-year-old boy who had been beaten to death, shot in the head, tied with barbed wire, and dropped in a river — I shook my head in disbelief.
What could anyone have done to deserve such a horrible punishment? My mother certainly knew the answer. And it is no exaggeration to say that we lived in the shadow of the Emmett Till murder for the rest of my growing-up years.
Yes, his death jumpstarted the triumphant Civil Rights Movement. But those were fraught years for us. For every act of heroism that followed the Till murder…
