“Emmett’s death was a precursor to the Civil Rights Movement,” Bayeza said.īayeza grew up in the time period where racist Jim Crow laws reigned high and wide.

Thus, the idea for Bayeza’s play “The Ballad of Emmett Till,” was born. Bayeza wanted to share that side of Till to the public. There was no real examination of Till as a young person. All they saw was a picture of a young black teenager who was inhumanely beaten and shot to death. What was he like as a young man? Bayeza felt none this had been explored before when folks thought about Till. The aftermath of hate crime left Emmett Till’s body unrecognizable. A child of the civil rights movement, Bayeza took all this into consideration when she began to develop a play about the life of the teenager. Till’s story has always fascinated noted playwright Ifa Bayeza. And that would be, allegedly, publicly displaying some sort of affection towards a white woman. In Till’s case, the burly black teenager paid the ultimate penalty for being born with the wrong skin color, visiting the wrong place in time, and doing wrong thing in the eyes of his killers. Back when the Chicago-born Till lived, a black man would pay dearly if he was even caught looking at a white woman, let alone date one. Interracial dating has become a woven fabric in today’s society. Life for African Americans in 1955, particularly those who lived in the South, was much different than it is today. Till’s accused killers got off, acquitted by an all-white jury. In “Death of Innocence,” the book Mamie Till Mobley wrote about the surroundings of her son’s death, upon seeing the body the first time, she said it didn’t even seem to be human and “looked like something out of a horror movie.” To this day, the veil left by the brutal death of Till has not been completely lifted. It is in those details that should serve as a constant reminder what it was like to be black and living in America when the value of African Americans as human beings were construed to be nothing more than the earthly soil they walked on. We can never forget of the anguish and terror Mamie Till Mobley felt as she went through the horrific details of identifying the body of her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till.

Death of innocence mamie till