Joe Biden Praises ‘Teal’ At White House Screening Today; “With truth comes healing and justice,” POTUS said during a Black History Month event

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences may have been horribly fragmented up to When it came to Oscar nominations this year, the President of the United States today had nothing but praise for the Chinoni Chukwu-directed film about the 1955 murder of civil rights activist teenager Emmett by racists and his mother’s relentless fight for justice.

“To everyone involved in this film, to paraphrase Maya Angelou: People will never forget how you make them feel,” Joe Biden said Thursday. up to Screening at the White House. “People will never forget how you make them feel,” the president added. “You know, that artist has a gift for making us feel our common humanity.”

Based on the horrific events of Emmett Till’s death in Mississippi nearly 70 years ago, and Mamie Till-Mobley’s determination to literally open her son’s casket at a Chicago funeral and illuminate the pain and trauma for the whole world to see. Suffering from his deadly search for equality, Till was released in cinemas last October. The Orion Pictures, MGM Pictures and United Artists Releasing film stars Daniel Deadwiler as Till-Mobley and Jalyn Hall as Emmett. Director Chukwu wrote the powerful script with Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp.

Chukwu, Deadwyle, Hall, Reilly, and Beauchamp were all in attendance at the East Room screening today to celebrate Black History Month. Also there was “Emmett Till’s family, students, civil rights leaders, historians and families of victims of hate-fueled violence,” as the White House said earlier this week, along with Whoopi Goldberg, who played Alma Carthon, Mamie’s mother, and Emmett. The film stars Grandmother and a producer, as well as fellow Teal producers Thomas Levine, Fred Zollo and Barbara Broccoli, who runs the James Bond franchise.

“Only with truth comes healing and justice and repair and one more step forward — that promise we’ve all made but never reached: a more perfect union,” POTUS told an invited audience before the screening. “But we never gave it up completely,” he continued. “So we cannot choose to learn what we want to know and learn what we ought to know. We should know everything about history. And that’s what great nations do. Great race. And we are a great nation.”

“And that’s why history is so important,” Biden added in his sometimes off-the-cuff remarks. “You know, that’s why this picture is so important.”

Nearly 120 years after such legislation was first introduced in Congress, Biden last year signed a bill named after Emmett Till into law that formally and finally made lynching a federal hate crime. As members of the Till family continue to pursue justice against Carolyn Bryant Donham, a now 90-year-old white woman who in August 1955 complained that Emmett made advances to her, the bill signed by Biden does nothing for the now-deceased Roy Bryant and JW Milam. , who were tried for Till’s murder and quickly acquitted by an all-white jury. Shortly afterward the Mississippi men, one of whom was married to Emmett’s accuser, admitted in a paid magazine interview that they had killed the 14-year-old.

Late last year, Till ANSD Till-Mobley was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award the organization can bestow.

White House press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre first announced at her February 14 briefing that the “incredibly powerful film” would be shown today. “We haven’t actually shown a lot of movies, so this month that we’re doing it, I think sends a strong message from the president and the first lady from this White House, how important we think it is. Get this movie out there and make sure his story continues to be told and not forgotten,” he said before an assembled White House press corps.

Today, President Biden echoed that statement in his own way: “And now, from the White House, during Black History Month, it’s my honor — and it’s a real honor — perhaps the greatest honor I’ve had since I became President — launching the film. my respect, up to God loves him.