BLOOMINGTON - The civil rights movement needs a youthful makeover. So says a filmmaker whose focus on the 1955 racial killing of Emmett Till led to the U.S. Justice Department reopening the unsolved case.

"Who do we have to pick up this mantel - unless we make our own leaders," said Keith Beauchamp, who spent a decade making "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till."

Beauchamp headlined the 16th Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Fellowship Dinner Sunday at Illinois Wesleyan University.

It's the responsibility of youth "to help keep the fire in the movement burning," said the New York filmmaker.

His advice isn't hollow. He was in his early 20s when he began researching the film, and eventually uncovered new evidence in the case.

Till was the Chicago teen brutally killed in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Money, Miss.

Two white suspects were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury, but the pair later admitted to their role in the killing. The case remains unsolved.

Till's death, and his mother's decision to leave his casket open, sparked what Beauchamp calls the start of the black resistance movement of the South, in turn giving birth to the U.S. civil rights movement.

Just months after Till's August murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white person, and King organized the Montgomery bus boycott.

The preacher soon caught the nation and world's attention with his nonviolent message for change. The three events each were part of the movement, said Beauchamp.

As a 10-year-old growing up in Louisiana, Beauchamp found photos of Till's open casket published in Jet Magazine. The haunting images stuck with him, he said.

In 1989, Beauchamp saw up close that racial problems of 1950s America hadn't been eliminated, he said. Then 18, he was beaten in Baton Rouge for dancing with a white woman.

Not long after, he began his quest for justice for Till - "all the while standing on the shoulders of those leaders like Martin Luther King," he said.

"But from Emmett Till to Hurricane Katrina, Dr. King's legacy (of fighting to eliminate social injustice) remains," he said.

"It's still people of color and the poor at the bottom of the totem pole," he said. "This manmade disaster will affect my home in Louisiana and change politics."

Katrina was a wake-up call for this generation, said Beauchamp. "It's time for you, the leaders of tomorrow to speak for those who can't."