‘Till” spares us scenes of the lynching of Emmett Till , but the film is difficult to bear anyway: When confronted with the sight of his coffin, his mother keens with such sorrow that it’s piercing and spectral, a wail to reverberate down the ages.
Bo Till , as he was known to his family, was an eager 14-year-old from Chicago whose mother, Mamie, allowed him to visit his cousins and great-uncle in Mississippi in the summer of 1955 for a sampling of rural life.
But four days after an encounter with a woman who co-owned a store in Money, Miss., Till was dragged out of his relatives’ house at gunpoint, beaten, and shot in the head before his body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River.