Whoopi Goldberg is getting back in her acting bag as she is set to star in a movie about Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley.
In the upcoming movie “Till,” Goldberg will play Till’s grandmother, Alma Carthan.
“We have waited a very long time to bring this historically necessary important film to people,” Goldberg said via Variety. “And as we watch the repression of American History when it comes to people of color it makes it even that more important. I couldn’t be with better people: Fred, Barbara, Chinonye, Keith, Michael and Danielle.”
Actress Danielle Deadwyler will play Mamie. Deadwyler has featured in Tyler Perry’s “The Haves and the Have Nots” as well as the HBO series “Watchmen.”
“I am charged with humility and great will to embody her life at such an integral moment of personal tragedy and political rebellion, a boon to the civil rights movement, and to represent the joy in the love and life shared between Mamie Till and her beloved Emmett Till,” Deadwyler told the publication.
“I am grateful for the women who support me as the one to carry the labor of this embodiment and as an inheritor of such a lineage. Much gratitude for Chinonye Chukwu, Barbara Broccoli, Whoopi Goldberg, Alana Mayo, and Pam Abdy, amongst many others, for the undertaking we seek to uplift and transfigure with this film.”
The news comes two months after ABC announced the airing of a “Women of the Movement,” focusing on the life of Mamie, whose son became a symbol of the civil rights movement after he was lynched in Mississippi in 1955.
Emmett, 14, was visiting relatives in Mississippi. During his visit, he and his cousins took a trip to the local store. A white woman named Carolyn Bryant claimed that Emmett whistled at her.
Her husband, Roy Bryant, and brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, kidnapped, tortured and brutally murdered him. After they killed him, they dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River.
At the funeral home, Mamie insisted she see Emmett’s face and body. The funeral director was reluctant as her son’s face had been beaten beyond recognition. Mississippi authorities also only agreed to send Till’s body on the condition that the casket stayed sealed. Mamie ordered an open-casket viewing.
