7:00pm Wednesday, May 3, 2023
N151 Integrative Learning Center, UMass Amherst
Till
(Chinonye Chukwu, 2022, USA, 130 min)
The powerful true story of Mamie Till-Mobley’s relentless pursuit of justice for her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till, who, in 1955, was lynched while visiting his cousins in Mississippi. In Mamie’s poignant journey of grief turned to action, we see the universal power of a mother’s ability to change the world. Reacting to the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement, Till honors the unparalleled strength of a mother demanding that the world look squarely at the monstrous reality of racism in America.
Co-Sponsored by:
UMass BTP Biotechnology Training Program, UMass Amherst Department of English, and UMass Amherst W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies
Film Screening
followed by
Discussion and Q&A with
Keith Beauchamp
(Writer/Producer)
and
Thomas K. Levine
(Producer)
Introduction by
Daphne Lamothe
(Smith College)
Free and open to the public.
*Note special time and location.
Keith Beauchamp
(Writer/Producer)
Award-Winning Filmmaker Keith A. Beauchamp attended Southern University in Baton Rouge where he studied Criminal Justice with the intention of becoming a Civil Rights Attorney. As a young boy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Beauchamp had his share of run-ins with racism but it wasn’t until an incident where he was assaulted by an undercover police officer after dancing with a white classmate at a party that he felt compelled to fight racism and move to New York. It was here he could pursue his dream of becoming a filmmaker. And through this feat, he’d attempt to remedy some of the past and present injustices that plague communities abroad. In the fall of 1997, Beauchamp relocated from Baton Rouge, Louisiana to New York. He quickly found work at Big Baby Films, a company founded by childhood friends that focused on music video production. Beauchamp honed his behind-the-camera skills during the day and spent his evenings doing research and reaching out to anyone who might have information on the Emmett Till case, a story told to Beauchamp when he was just 10 years old. It was at this young age that Beauchamp saw a Jet magazine that contained a picture of Emmett Till’s dead body and was told the story behind Till’s murder.
(TILL FREEDOM COME PRODUCTIONS)
Daphne Lamothe
(Professor and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies, Smith College)
Daphne Lamothe is a literary and cultural studies scholar with research and teaching interests in African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black migration and transnational literatures. She holds a doctorate in English literature from UC Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Yale University. In addition to an appointment in Africana studies, she also is a member of Smith’s programs in American studies and the Study of Women and Gender. She serves on the executive board of Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. Before joining the Smith faculty in 2004, she taught at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Lamothe’s research focuses on literary and cultural representations of black consciousness formed by migratory and transnational experiences. Her publications explore questions of national and cultural belonging, identity, and symbolic geographies within the Black Atlantic imagination. She is currently working on a study of representations of black subjects in urban spaces whose experience of selfhood is shaped by the absence of ideals of home, origin, and belonging.
Lamothe’s teaching includes courses on the Harlem Renaissance, African American migration narratives, Black music and literature, Blackness, and the City, and literatures of the African Diaspora.