Family of lynching victim Emmett Till seek justice after finding 1955 warrant
IN THE summer of 1955, Emmett Till was accused of making a lewd pass at a white shopkeeper in Money, Mississippi.
Four days later, the 14-year-old black boy was lynched by her relatives in what would become one of the most emblematic cases of racial injustice in America’s civil rights era.
Now, 67 years on, Till’s family are calling for the arrest of the woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, after rediscovering a warrant against her in the dusty archives of Lefore County.
Ms Donham, who was 21 when she made the accusation, is now 88. According to the old warrant, she was involved in kidnapping Till.
Despite two failed reopenings of the case in the last 20 years, Till’s cousin, Deborah Watts, and her daughter, Teri, continued to search for evidence that they hoped might see somebody jailed for the killing.
They knew that the warrant against Ms Donham existed because it was publicised at the time of the murder, despite not being acted on.
But the Leflore County archives have no indexing system beyond sorting documents into boxes labelled by decade, leaving them with a monumental task of finding it.
Ms Watts and her helpers, part of the Emmett Till Foundation that she heads, were able to narrow the search down to boxes relating to the 1950s and 1960s, but that was it.
Finally, after years of systematic searching, one of the boxes provided exactly what they were looking for: the warrant charging Ms Donham with kidnapping. The county clerk, who certified the warrant as genuine, said the group had “got lucky” in their search.
“Serve it and charge her,” Ms Watts said.
The warrant was not executed at the time, the then-county sheriff told reporters, because he did not want to “bother” the woman since she had two young children to care for.
Ricky Banks, the current sheriff of Leflore County, told reporters he would investigate whether action was needed.
Legal experts said it was unlikely that the warrant would be considered still valid by a judge. Instead, it may need to be used in conjunction with new evidence as justification for arresting and interrogating Ms Donham.
The case against her would appear to hinge on how heavily involved she was in the lynching, so whether she was in the truck with her husband, who lynched him, when he went to find the teenager and if she helped identify him.