Could US lynching victim’s family win justice 67 years on?
THE family of a teenager lynched in one of America’s most infamous race killings want his accuser brought to justice after an old arrest warrant turned up.
Emmett Till, 14, was kidnapped and murdered nearly 70 years ago.
Now a team searching a Mississippi courthouse for evidence about the killing has found an unserved warrant charging a white woman over the 1955 kidnap.
The warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham, identified as Mrs Roy Bryant on the document, was found last week in a file that had gathered dust in a basement for decades.
Miss Donham is now in her 80s, but in 1955 she was married to one of two white men tried, and acquitted, weeks after Emmett was abducted from a relative’s home, tortured, murdered and dumped in a river. ‘Serve it and charge her,’ said Teri Watts, a relative of Emmett.
Miss Donham, who was 21 at the time, had accused Emmett of making improper advances at her family’s grocery store in Money, Mississippi. A cousin of Emmett who was with him said he had whistled at the woman, an act that flew in the face of Mississippi’s racist social codes of the era.
Evidence indicates a woman, thought to be Miss Donham, pointed Emmett out to his killers. The arrest warrant was issued against her but the sheriff said at the time he did not want to ‘bother’ the woman as she had two young children.
Emmett, from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he entered the store on August 24. Miss Donham testified in court that he whistled at her, grabbed her and made a lewd comment.
Several nights later, her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, JW Milam, who were armed, went to the home of Emmett’s greatuncle, Mose Wright, looking for the boy. Emmett’s mutilated body, weighed down with a fan, was pulled from a river days later.
His mother’s decision to open the casket so that the thousands of mourners at his funeral in Chicago could see what had happened, shocked the country and helped to galvanise the civil rights movement. But it was not until 1964 and the murder of three activists, on which the film Mississippi Burning is based, that the Civil Rights Act was passed. It was only this year that Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law.
Bryant and Milam were acquitted of murder by an all-white jury but later, in a magazine interview for which they were paid $4,500, they confessed to the killing, knowing they could not be tried again.
During the trial Mose Wright said that a person with a voice ‘lighter’ than a man’s identified Emmett and the kidnappers took him away.
Miss Watts said that the Till family believe the warrant amounts to new evidence. A US justice department inquiry ended without charges in 2007 and in December a report said no prosecution was possible.
Donham, who was last known to be living in North Carolina, has not commented. Bryant died in 1994, 14 years after Milam.
Ronald J Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi, said an arrest warrant from 1955 would be unlikely to pass muster before a court, even if a sheriff served it.
‘Mutilated body pulled from river’