Lawsuit seeks white woman's arrest in Emmett Till kidnapping

JACKSON — A relative of Emmett Till is suing to try to make a Mississippi sheriff serve a 1955 arrest warrant on a white woman in the kidnapping that led to the Black teenager's brutal lynching.

The torture and killing of Till in the Mississippi Delta became a catalyst for the civil rights movement after his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago and Jet magazine published photos of his mutilated body.

Last June, a team doing research at the courthouse in Leflore County, Mississippi, found an unserved 1955 arrest warrant for Carolyn Bryant, listed on that document as "Mrs. Roy Bryant."

Till's cousin Patricia Sterling of Jackson, Mississippi, filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the current Leflore County sheriff, Ricky Banks. The suit seeks to compel Banks to serve the ham, identified Till to the warrant on Carolyn Bryant, men who later killed him. who has since remarried and The arrest warrant against is named Carolyn Bryant Donham was publicized Donham. in 1955, but the Leflore

"We are using the available County sheriff at the time means at our disposal told reporters that he did to try to achieve justice on not want to "bother" the behalf of the Till family," woman since she was raising Sterling's attorney Trent two young children. Walker told The Associated Weeks after Till's body Press on Friday. was found in a river, her

The AP left a phone message husband Roy Bryant and for Banks on Friday, his half-brother J.W. Milam seeking comment. The sheriff were tried for murder and did not immediately respond. acquitted by an all-white Court records showed jury. Months later, the men that the lawsuit had not been confessed in a paid interview served on him by Friday. with Look magazine.

Till, who was 14, had Now in her late 80s, traveled south from Chicago Donham has lived in North to visit relatives in Mississippi Carolina and Kentucky in in August 1955. Donham recent years. She has not accused him of making commented publicly on improper advances on her at calls for her prosecution. a grocery store in the small The U.S. Justice Department community of Money. A announced in cousin of Till who was there December 2021 that it has said Till whistled at the had ended its latest investigation woman, an act that flew in into the lynching the face of Mississippi's racist of Till, without bringing social codes of the era. charges against anyone.

Evidence indicates a After researchers found woman, possibly Don- the arrest warrant last June, the office of Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said in July there was no new evidence to try to pursue a criminal case against Donham. In August, a district attorney said a Leflore County grand jury had declined to indict Donham.

Walker, the attorney for Till's cousin, said Friday that the South has a history of cases of violence that were not brought to justice until decades later — including the 1963 assassination of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, for which white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith was convicted of murder in 1994.

"But for Carolyn Bryant falsely claiming to her husband that Emmett Till assaulted her Emmett would not have been murdered," Sterling's lawsuit says. "It was Carolyn Bryant's lie that sent Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam into a rage, which resulted in the mutilation of Emmett Till's body into (an) unrecognizable condition."