“I cried. We cried. We hugged,” Deborah Watts, Emmett’s cousin, told CNN of the moment she said members of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation found the order in a dusty, damp box at a county courthouse in Greenwood, Mississippi. “Unbelievable. We held each other. Justice must be served.”
The warrant was discovered last week by a five-member search team led by Till’s family members, including Deborah Watts and her daughter Terri. An image of the warrant provided to CNN by the foundation accuses JW Milam, Roy Bryant and Bryant’s then-wife — identified in the document as Mrs. Roy Bryant — of kidnapping and orders their arrests. The order is dated August 29, 1955 and signed by the Leflore County Clerk.
The two men were acquitted of Emmett’s murder soon after by an all-white jury, although they later confessed to the killing in an interview with Look magazine. Milam died in 1980 and Bryant in 1994, but his widow — now Carolyn Bryant Donham — is still alive, and Emmett’s family hopes the warrant will lead to her arrest and eventually justice.
“Justice must be served,” Watts told CNN, adding, “Emmett brought us to this. I know that in my heart.”
An image of the warrant shows the current LeFlore County Clerk authenticated the document on June 21. In the absence of action by law enforcement in light of the finding, the family has considered launching an initiative to help bring justice to Emmett’s brutal murder.
“We thought about things like civil arrest,” Watts said. “If the authorities won’t do this, what can we do?” Watts told CNN.
The family believes the warrant serves as new evidence that went decades unsought, Watts added, and when it was found, the family was overcome with emotion.
“It was overwhelming … We were in a state of shock as well,” Watts said.
Terri Watts echoed those sentiments: “I had to look at the warrant a few times just to make sure it was real,” she said.
“I definitely want to experience it. But it was a huge trauma. I still feel the weight is on our shoulders. We’ve discovered the new evidence and so we just want justice to be served,” Terry Watts said.
The warrant’s discovery was first reported by the New York Amsterdam News, one of the nation’s oldest African-American publications. According to The New York Times, an affidavit attached to the warrant said the three “willfully, unlawfully and criminally, and without lawful authority, forcibly seized, imprisoned and abducted” Emmett, even though his last name was misspelled . A note on the back of the warrant said Donham was not arrested because she could not be located at the time, the Times reported, citing filmmaker Keith A. Beauchamp, who was part of the team that discovered the warrant.
Neither Donham nor the LeFlore County District Attorney’s Office responded to CNN’s requests for comment.
Professor claims Donham recanted testimony that Emmett Till grabbed her
Although Emmett’s murder remains a watershed moment in the United States’ long struggle with racial injustice and inequality, to this day no one has been held criminally accountable.
The 14-year-old boy from Chicago was visiting family in Mississippi when he had his fateful meeting with then-20-year-old Carolyn Bryant. Accounts of that day vary, but witnesses say Emmett whistled at the woman at the market she owned with her husband in Money, Mississippi.
Roy Bryant and Milam later took Emmett from his bed, ordered him into the back of a pickup truck, and beat him before shooting him in the head and dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River. But both were acquitted of murder after a trial in which Carolyn Bryant testified that Emmett grabbed her and verbally threatened her. The jury deliberated for only an hour. In 2007, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Donham. And according to archived FBI documents, Milam and Roy Bryant were arrested on kidnapping charges in 1955, but a grand jury failed to indict them. “Original court, district attorney and investigative records related to the 1955 investigation have apparently been lost,” the FBI said in a 2006 report.
Donham testified in 1955 that Emmett grabbed her arm, her waist and proposed, saying he had been with “white women before.” But years later, when Professor Timothy Tyson brought up that testimony at trial in 2008 in an interview with Donham, he claimed she told him, “That part is not true.”
The prospect that the woman at the center of Emmett’s case had recanted her testimony — which the U.S. Department of Justice said in a memorandum would contradict statements she made at the state trial in 1955 and later to FBI – prompted calls for authorities to reinvestigate the case. The Justice Department, which had already reopened and closed the case in 2007, reopened the investigation into Emmett’s killing in 2018. But the case was closed in December after the Justice Department’s civil rights division concluded it could not prove that Donham lied. When questioned directly, Donham flatly denied to investigators that she had recanted her testimony.
Emmett’s death attracted attention far beyond Mississippi after a photo of his mutilated body was published in Jet Magazine and circulated around the world. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, asked him to have an open-casket funeral so the world could see her son’s injuries and the results of racial terrorism, a decision that helped fuel the civil rights movement.
Emmett’s legacy lives on, however: In March, President Joe Biden signed Emmett’s landmark Anti-Lynching Act, which made lynching a federal hate crime.
CNN’s Devon Sayers, Elizabeth Joseph and Elliot S. McLaughlin contributed to this report.
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