A podcast may not seem like the most obvious choice to tell a story so tied in the public imagination to one photograph. But it proved an ideal medium to recount the efforts of Mamie Till-Mobley to seek justice for the horrific lynching of her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till, at the hands of two white men in Mississippi in 1955. The single mother’s decision to allow the press to publish photos of Emmett’s open casket, his face mutilated beyond recognition, and her courageous testimony before an all-white jury galvanized support for the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South just a few months before Rosa Parks’ act of defiance in Montgomery.
ABC Audio’s Reclaimed: The Story of Mamie Till-Mobley, which leads the 2023 Ambie Awards with three nominations including podcast of the year, serves as a companion podcast to the ABC News docuseries Let the World See. The three episodes wove together first-person recollections from members of Till-Mobley’s family members, reflections from Michelle Obama and archival recordings of Till-Mobley herself, among other sources.
The podcast was created by an all-female team — including senior producer Lakeia Brown, supervising producer Suzie Liu, host Leah Wright Rigueur and ABC Audio vp and executive producer Liz Alesse. Notes Brown, “A theme within the series is a mother’s love, just the idea that she was this important figure in the civil rights movement and she did this courageous thing, but at the root of it, she was a mother who lost her child.”
The audio series aired in June, well before the release of Till, the MGM Studios film starring Danielle Deadwyler as Mamie Till-Mobley. The filmmaking team did not collaborate with the creators of the audio series, though Alesse says the dramatized feature “speaks to how resonant the story is.”
Narrator Wright Rigueur, an associate history professor at Johns Hopkins University who is also nominated for best podcast host, says the growing number of projects about Till-Mobley keeps issues around race and justice front and center, especially given ongoing instances of police brutality against Black men, many of whose mothers go on to become visible faces of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“People are starting to understand that you can’t tell one story without the other,” Wright Rigueur says. “We see the emergence of an entire class of individuals that we call ‘mothers of the movement.’ Well, where do they come from? They come from Mamie Till-Mobley. They’re born out of her experience. She’s the original mother of the movement.”
This story first appeared in the Feb. 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
