Women of the Movement is an American historical drama Mini Series in six parts that premiered on ABC on January 6, 2022. Created and written by Marissa Jo Cerar, it stars Adrienne Warren, Tonya Pinkins, Gary Basaraba, Cedric Joe, Glynn Turman, Ray Fisher, Chris Coy, Julia McDermott, Carter Jenkins, Gil Bellows, Leslie Silva and Timothy Hutton. The series is based on the book Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement by Devery S. Anderson.
In 1955 Mississippi, black teen Emmett Louis Till is viciously lynched and murdered after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. His mother Mamie Till starts fighting to make sure he will not be forgotten and to get justice for him, and this will ultimately help to spawn the Civil Rights Movement.
Compare the film Till, which is about the same story and was released in October 2022, nine months after the miniseries.
Women of the Movement provides examples of the following tropes:
- The '40s: The series starts in 1941 with Emmett's birth.
- The '50s: The bulk of the story takes place just before and then after the murder of Emmett in 1955.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Like the real-life murder, Emmett is brutally beaten, tied and dragged by car, wrapped with a barb wire and strapped to a cotton gin, burned, have his right eye forcefully cut out, and shot in the head before being dumped in the river. The brutality of the murder left his body and especially his face horrifically disfigured upon recognition. And it is all shown on-screen.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Emmett is brutally tortured and murdered for making comments towards a white woman in a grocery store.
- Good Parent: Mamie has raised Emmett with love.
- Police Are Useless: The police in league with the Ku Klux Klan down in Mississippi and they refuse to do their job in finding Emmett after he was kidnapped. It is only when Emmett's body is found by local citizens in the river is when they finally take action by arresting his killers.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Obviously Roy Bryant and friend J.W. Milam, who killed Emmett out of racial hatred.
- The Savage South: Mamie is very worried that Emmett has to go to Mississippi, knowing how racially intolerant it is there compared to Chicago, and advises her son to keep a low profile. His lynching down there proves her right.
- Second Love: Gene Mobley is Mamie's boyfriend in 1955, and he's not Emmett's father. In Real Life, Emmett's father Louis Till was executed by the U.S. Army in 1945 after being found guilty of sexually assaulting two white women and murdering a third.
- Stock Footage: Following Emmett's birth, there is footage of the U.S. Supreme Court declaring that segregated schools are unconstitutional (in 1954), burning crosses and parades of the Ku Klux Klan and black demonstrations to put an end to segregation.
- Three-Month-Old Newborn: The baby actor used as newborn Emmett clearly wasn't newborn.
- Time Skip: There's a 14-year time skip following the birth of Emmett.
- Would Hurt a Child: Roy and J.W. do not care that Emmett is just a teenage boy. All they see in him is just someone who is inferior to them because of his skin color. After being kidnapped, Roy and J.W. at first beat Emmett before delving into a monstrous torture-fest after questioning him, concluding with him being dumped into the river.
