Will Smith and JAY-Z discuss their new show Women of the Movement, which focuses on the story of Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley.

Source: Kevin Mazur / Getty

The New Year marked the debut of the first season of ABC’s latest historical anthology series: Women of the Movement. The show sets out with the task to tell the story of educator and activist Mamie Till-Mobley, whose son Emmett Till was brutally murdered at age 14 by two racist white women following accusations he whistled at a white woman in 1955.

Mamie had her son’s body shipped from Mississippi where the murder happened to her hometown of Chicago. She held an open-casket funeral so the world could see how badly beaten her son was. Till’s assailants would go on to be acquitted by an all-white jury in Mississippi and that’s when his mother embarked on a life advocating for civil rights and fighting to abolish the death penalty. She fought every day up until she died in 2003.

The show was co-produced by JAY-Z and Will Smith and written by Marissa Jo Cerar. Recently, all three took time out of their busy schedules to hop on a Zoom call and discuss the show and the beautiful stories they got to tell, and how it all came about.

Watch their conversation in full below.