2017 book prompts FBI to reopen Emmitt Till case
New information published in a 2017 book prompted federal investigators to reopen their probe into the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi, according to two people familiar with the case.
Till, a 14-year-old visiting from Chicago, was murdered after he was accused of whistling at and making sexual advances toward a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, during an interaction at Bryant’s grocery store in Money, Miss. The teen was kidnapped Aug. 28, 1955, and was tortured and shot. His mangled body was found days later in the Tallahatchie River.
The book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” by historian Timothy Tyson, includes the first known interview with Bryant, during which she conceded that Till had not made sexual advances — a disclosure that contradicted her testimony six decades earlier, when she told a jury that Till grabbed her by the waist and uttered obscenities.
“That part’s not true,” Bryant — now known as Carolyn Donham — told Tyson, according to the book. “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”
The release of Tyson’s book in January 2017 reignited interest in the federal investigation into the case, which put a spotlight on racial violence and galvanized the civil rights movement.
The Washington Post was unable to reach Donham, who is now in her 80s and lives in Raleigh, N.C.
Tyson, who said he talked to Donham in two interviews in 2008 and finished writing the book eight years later, said someone from the FBI contacted him a few months after his book was published. He gave the FBI agent “everything he wanted to see,” Tyson said, and his research materials were subpoenaed.
Donham’s former husband, Roy Bryant, and brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, were prosecuted for Till’s death. An all-white jury acquitted them after just over an hour of deliberation — but the two later told a journalist that they had killed Till. They died without being convicted.
Federal and state officials have reinvestigated the case in recent decades, but none of the probes resulted in new charges. The case was closed in 2007.