Emmett Till’s Relatives Want Police to Serve Ignored 1955 Warrant for Black Teen’s Kidnapping
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Carolyn Bryant Donham was never charged for her alleged role in connection with the abduction, torture and murder of Emmett Till, a Black teenage boy who in 1955 she accused of whistling at her outside a Money, Mississippi, store.
However, Till’s surviving family members want that to change after they found an unserved arrest warrant for Donham, 88, in a government file last week.
The warrant is dated for August 29, 1955 - the day after Till’s death, but before his body was discovered.
Donham has previously admitted to making up a large part of the story that got Till lynched. At the time, Donham, then 21 years old, claimed that Till, 14, had “wolf whistled” at her and grabbed her in front of a grocery store owned by her husband, Roy Bryant.
"That part’s not true," Donham told journalist Timothy Tyson in 2007.
Several days after their encounter, Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam grabbed guns and abducted Till from his great-uncle’s house. After torturing and mutilating him, the two men shot Till in the head and attempted to hide his body by sinking it in the Tallahatchee River. His body was discovered three days later.
Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, insisted on holding her son’s funeral with an open coffin, exposing to the world the brutality of his death. The images circulated in the press around the globe, arousing fury at the Jim Crow system of racial apartheid that reigned supreme in the American South.
FILE - An undated portrait of Emmett Louis Till, a black 14 year old Chicago boy, whose weighted down body was found in the Tallahatchie River near the Delta community of Money, Mississippi, August 31, 1955. Local residents Roy Bryant, 24, and J.W. Milam, 35, were accused of kidnapping, torturing and murdering Till for allegedly whistling at Bryant's wife. A team searching the basement of a Mississippi courthouse for evidence about the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till has found the unserved warrant in June 2022 charging a white woman in his kidnapping in 1955, and relatives of the victim want authorities to finally arrest her nearly 70 years later.
© AP Photo / AP Photo
The day after Till’s kidnapping and murder, police arrested Bryant and Milam on suspicion of kidnapping, and were later charged with Till’s murder. However, they were acquitted by an all-white jury.
According to the AP, the arrest warrant for Donham - which read “Mrs. Roy Bryant” - was publicized at the time as well, but the Leflore County sheriff had said he didn’t want to “bother” her because she had two young children.
Leflore County Sheriff Ricky Banks told the AP that he had never heard about the warrant before, including when a former district attorney investigated the case several years ago, but would consult with law enforcement where Donham currently lives in North Carolina.
Only earlier this year did Congress pass a federal anti-lynching bill making it a hate crime; the law is named after Till. The first federal anti-lynching bill had been introduced 122 years prior.
