The women of the civil rights movement will take center stage in a new ABC anthology series. Written by Marissa Jo Cerar (“The Handmaid’s Tale”), the project, tentatively titled “Women of the Movement,” is being developed “with a significant penalty attached to it,” Deadline confirms. The first eight-episode season, inspired by Devery S. Anderson’s book “Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement,” will focus on Mamie Till.

Mamie Till’s son, Emmett Till, was brutally murdered by two white men in 1955. The 14-year-old Chicago native was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, when he was abducted, tortured, and shot in the back of the head by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. His body was then thrown into the Tallahatchie River. Emmett’s killers believed he had flirted with Bryant’s wife. They were acquitted by an all-white jury and later admitted to the murder, knowing that double jeopardy would shield them from punishment.

Mamie helped revitalize the movement by demanding an open-casket funeral for her son — she wanted “the world to see what they did to [her] baby.” Tens of thousands of people viewed Emmett’s body and pictures of his casket and funeral were circulated across the country. Mamie shared the story of her son on a successful NAACP tour.

Mamie Till died in 2003 at the age of 81.

Jay-Z and Will Smith are among the anthology’s executive producers. It hails from Roc Nation, Overbrook Entertainment, and Kapital Entertainment. Those companies originally set up the project at HBO five years ago. When that didn’t pan out, the producers decided to retool the show as a women-driven anthology and hired Cerar.

Season 2 of “Women of the Movement” will purportedly be about Rosa Parks. Three months after Emmett’s murder, she refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. “I thought of Emmett Till and I just couldn’t go back,” she later remembered.

“Some believe that Mamie and Parks did meet in a symbolic passing of the baton in the civil rights movement, which ‘Women of the Movement’ will incorporate,” the source details. The idea is for each season of “Women of the Movement” to naturally transition to the next.

Along with “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Cerar has written for and produced “13 Reasons Why” and “Shots Fired.” She also served as a writer and story editor on “The Fosters.”