Producers Frederick Zollo and Thomas Levine are set to bring to the big screen the story of Emmett Till, the black teenager from Chicago who was killed in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman says The Hollywood Reporter.
Till's killing by a group of white Southerners is widely recognized as the impetus of the civil rights movement. The men were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury after less than an hour of deliberation. Four months later, they boasted about the crime in an interview with Look magazine but were never brought to justice because of laws against double jeopardy.
Zollo and Levine are teaming on a narrative feature with director Keith Beauchamp, whose ThinkFilm documentary "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till" is in theaters.
