Questions unresolved decades after murder
Some upset with recent decision not to indict woman involved in case
By her own telling, Mississippi authorities provided Carolyn Bryant Donham with preferential treatment rather than prosecution after her encounter with Emmett Till led to the lynching of the Black teenager in the summer of 1955.
Instead of arresting Donham on a warrant that accused her of kidnapping days after Till’s abduction, an officer passed along word that relatives would take her and her two young sons away from home amid a rising furor over the case, Donham said in a 2008 memoir made public last month. The sheriff would later claim Donham, 21 at the time, could not be located for arrest.
Once her husband and his half-brother were jailed on murder charges in Till’s death, she said in the unpublished manuscript, two men with the sheriff’s office drove her and her sister-in-law to the lockup for a relaxed visit outside their cell and even ferried the women back home.
Later, before their murder trial, the men somehow were allowed to attend a family dinner without guards, she said.
“I was shocked! How in the world were they released from jail to come to eat supper with us? I didn’t see who dropped them off or picked them up to return them to jail, but we had a wonderful evening together,” Donham recalled in the memoir, written by her daughter-in-law based on the older woman’s words.
Nearly 70 years later, Donham’s retelling of the days surrounding Till’s abduction and lynching stokes fresh frustration among relatives of Till and activists pushing for Donham’s prosecution, particularly now that a Mississippi grand jury has decided against charging her with kidnapping in his abduction or manslaughter in his death.
For them, the revelations also raise questions about whether Donham, now 88, is still being protected despite what they see as new evidence against her.
Carolyn Donham has rarely commented publicly on the Till case, and she has not said anything publicly about the recent decision against new charges. That’s why her memoir — made public by a historian who said he obtained it during an interview years ago — created such a stir when it was released a few weeks ago. The decision not to indict her followed media reports with details of the document, but it’s unclear whether grand jurors considered contents of the autobiography.
In the 99-page memoir, Donham said 14-year-old Till, who was visiting relatives in Mississippi from Chicago, walked into the family-owned store where she was minding the counter on Aug. 24, 1955. Neither husband Roy Bryant nor his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were around that day — it was just her and Till, who also went by the family nickname of “Bobo.”
In the account, Donham repeats her testimony from the murder trial that Till grabbed her and made lewd comments. He also whistled, she said, in the only part of her story backed up by Till cousin and witness Wheeler Parker Jr. during an interview with the Associated Press.
Evidence indicated Till was abducted at gunpoint days later by two armed white men, and a woman likely identified the youth for them. While Donham denied in the memoir identifying Till and says she instead tried to help him, she was named in a kidnapping warrant along with Bryant and Milam. Donham was never arrested despite police knowing where she was at least part of the time.
For a period, Donham said, she was spirited away with the knowledge of officers and “shu±ed” between homes by the Bryant family. Then, with Donham in the courtroom, the two men were tried and acquitted in Till’s murder. The kidnapping charges were dropped later, and no one has been charged or tried since.
Following their acquittal, Bryant and Milam admitted to the abduction and killing in an interview with Look magazine.
In the memoir, Donham said she did not even know there was a warrant for her arrest until an FBI agent told her during a renewed probe decades later.
The warrant sat unknown and unseen in the basement of a Mississippi courthouse until June, when members of the Till family and others found it during a search. At the time of the killing, Donham wrote, “they didn’t even tell me there was a warrant.”
“I was never arrested or charged with anything,” she said.
The nagging question for some is, why not? Keith Beauchamp, a filmmaker and activist who helped find the warrant, believes the decision against indicting Donham lies not with the grand jurors who voted against new charges but with a system that goes back generations.
Mississippi law enforcement, which was all-white at the time of the killing, allowed Donham to avoid justice in a misguided quest to protect “white womanhood,” he said, and that same veil is covering her now.
“Chivalrous impulse allowed this woman to go untouched for 67 years,” said Beauchamp, who released the documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till in 2005 and helped write and produce the upcoming movie Till,a drama set to premiere in October.
But in announcing a Leflore County grand jury’s decision not to indict Donham, District Attorney Dewayne Richardson on Tuesday cited neither race nor womanhood or anything else but evidence. Members of the panel were presented with testimony from witnesses who told about the investigation of Till’s killing from 2004 until now, he said in a statement.
“After hearing more than seven hours of testimony from witnesses with direct knowledge about this case and the investigators that investigated this case, the Grand Jury determined that there was not sufficient evidence to indict Donham,” said Richardson, who is Black.
Members of the Till family weren’t pleased with the decision. Yet the Rev. Wheeler Parker of Chicago, a Till cousin who was with the youth the night he was abducted from a family home, sounded a conciliatory tone about the failure to obtain an indictment, a decision which he called “unfortunate but predictable.”