The first tape of Eyes on the Prize also tells this story with news clips of the actual people involved. I was so impressed with Mrs. Mobley's dignity, courage, beauty and perseverance in the face of gross and horrible injustice. Newscasters had the gall to ask her why she had come down from Chicago to Mississippi for the trial--if she had any information about the murder. She said, "I know he's my son."

I was also amazed by the courage of Till's uncle who stood up in court and pointed out the two white men who had taken Emmett away in the night--took him out of his bed. Everyone knew they had done it, yet they were acquitted by the all white jury. The clip of them smiling after the verdict with their wives is disgusting.

I used to borrow the tape from a teacher's library to show my freshmen high school English students. When the library closed, I spent $100 getting a replacement off of Ebay. I never watched the whole Eyes on the Prize series. I think there were 12 tapes! But I watched that first one (The Awakening) every year. It told the stories of Emmett Till and also of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, featuring a young and handsome and inspirational Martin Luther King. I can't recommend it highly enough. The narrator's voice is magnificent. Along with that tape we read the Gwendolyn Brooks poem https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/bronzeville-mother-loiters-mississippi-meanwhile-mississippi-mother-burns-bacon plus her short poem "The last quatrain of the ballad of Emmett Till," which I mistakenly believed was the last stanza of the poem above. They fit together. Sometimes, students cried...

Teachers across the country teach "To Kill a Mockingbird" to their freshmen English students, and lately there's been some negative feedback about that book, but for me it provided the opening I needed to show this movie and read these poems and help my (mostly white and Latino and Asian) students to understand the horrible cancer of racism that afflicts our country.