Warrant has Emmett Till’s family calling for arrest
Unserved document names woman linked to teen’s infamous killing
Six months ago, the case of Emmett Till’s murder was officially closed by the Department of Justice, without apology, without justice according to Till’s surviving relatives. On that day in December, the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., Till’s cousin and best friend, who was in the Mississippi house when Till was kidnapped, said he suffered 66 years of pain over Till’s murder.
Days after the 14-yearold was killed, his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, where it was tossed after being weighted down with a cotton gin fan.
Emmett Till’s murder was officially closed by the Department of Justice, without apology, without justice according to Till’s surviving relatives.
Two white men, Roy Bryant, and his half brother J.W. Milam, were tried on murder charges about a month after Till was killed, but an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted them. Months later, they confessed in a paid interview with Look magazine.
Now, the discovery of an unserved 1955 warrant charging Carolyn Bryant Donham, the wife of Bryant and a witness to events leading up to the murder, has the Till family calling for an arrest and answers, according to Associated Press.
Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism associate professor Christopher Benson has worked with Parker for years on research and FBI investigations into Till’s murder for an upcoming book — Benson’s second on Till’s killing. Benson stood with Parker in December 2021 at a news conference about the closing of the DOJ case. Benson is unsure where this latest development will ultimately lead.
“The fact that a warrant now has surfaced, a warrant we always knew existed or at least heard existed, raises a couple of questions: Can the warrant still be served and what it’s going to mean if it is served,” Benson said.
A group that included Till’s relatives found the warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham — identified as “Mrs. Roy Bryant” — in a Mississippi courthouse basement. The document was inside a file folder that had been placed in a box, Leflore County Circuit Clerk Elmus Stockstill told Associated Press. Documents are kept inside boxes by decade, he said, but there was nothing else to indicate where the warrant, dated Aug. 29, 1955, might have been. “They got lucky,” Stockstill said, who certified the warrant as genuine.
Benson calls the discovery highly unusual but said these things can happen.
Donham’s name resurfaced in the media after she allegedly recanted her account of the events leading up to Till’s murder in professor Timothy Tyson’s “The Blood of Emmett Till.” In response, the Department of Justice and the FBI examined whether Donham had recanted and if so, whether she had information that would allow prosecution of any living person, including herself. The multiyear investigation of new and prior evidence didn’t uncover sufficient evidence to support a federal prosecution.
The Justice Department in 2004 opened an investigation of Till’s killing after it received inquiries about whether charges could be brought against anyone still living. The department said the statute of limitations had run out on any potential federal crime, but the FBI worked with state investigators to determine if state charges could be brought. In February 2007, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict anyone, and the Justice Department announced it was closing the case. Bryant and Milam were not brought to trial again and are now dead. Donham has been living in North Carolina.
The FBI in 2006 began a cold case initiative to investigate racially motivated killings from decades earlier. A federal law named after Till allows a review of killings that had not been solved or prosecuted to the point of a conviction.
Per the Department of Justice’s statement, the government’s reinvestigation found no new evidence suggesting that either the woman or any other living person was involved in Till’s abduction and murder. Even if such evidence could be developed, no federal hate crime laws existed in 1955, and the statute of limitations has run out on the only civil rights statutes that were in effect at that time. As such, even if a living suspect could now be identified, a federal prosecution for Till’s abduction and murder would not be possible.
“There have been two major legs of this investigation, one starting in 2004 that generated some 8,000 pages of documents. Carolyn Bryant was the focus of that investigation. A grand jury determined there was not enough evidence to indict in 2007. The investigation was reawakened in January 2017 and still nothing resulted in an indictment or charges,” Benson said.
“While the discovery of this warrant certainly makes for compelling headlines, the issue is will there be enough to hold Carolyn Bryant Donham to account and if the investigation of 2004, 2006 didn’t produce it, if the restart of the investigation in 2017 to 2021 didn’t produce it, then where’s the evidence that will lead to some form of justice in this case, finally? We all want that without question. We have believed for all these years that Carolyn Bryant Donham had some involvement; it just hasn’t been established legally. And that’s what you need in order to advance a criminal proceeding.”
Since December, Till’s name has become associated
with legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime and prevent racist killers from evading justice. The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, authored by U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, states a crime can be prosecuted as a lynching when a conspiracy to commit a hate crime results in death or serious bodily injury. A maximum sentence of 30 years for a perpetrator convicted under the anti-lynching act will be given, in addition to any other federal criminal charges the perpetrators may face.
Till’s legacy was further cemented in the public landscape with the immersive stage adaptation of the 1955 trial transcript performed by Collaboraction, “Trial in the Delta: The Murder of Emmett Till.” WMAQ-Ch. 5. news anchor Marion Brooks found the transcript in her research of Till and wanted to get the details out to the public. The play has since been put on screen as Part Two of Brooks’ documentary on Till, “The Lost Story of Emmett Till: The Universal Child.”
Benson said one has to think about the emotional toll Till’s case takes on his family.
“To get your hopes raised in 2004, and then to have them dashed; get your hopes raised again in 2017 to be disappointed again. What is this going to do?” Benson asked. “My relationship with
Wheeler Parker gives me some basis to say that they will always want to see some accountability for this. In Wheeler’s view, that means at least getting at the truth, because there have been so many lies associated with this story over the years. Bringing somebody to account through a criminal process certainly would be something they would welcome.
“When they closed the
case this past December, they (the DOJ) did say that closing the case doesn’t mean that it can’t be reopened if something new develops,” Benson said. “The question is going to be whether this is that something new that would cause them to reopen the case.”