Four-year-old Senty Banutu-Gomez holds a photo of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy who was lynched in 1955 at a vigil on the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder while detained at Minneapolis Police Department in Lynn, Massachusetts. USA, May 25, 2021. REUTERS / Brian Snyder / File Photo
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June 30 (Reuters) – Emmett Till’s family unveils a nearly 67-year-old arrest warrant for a white woman whose discredited charges against a black teenager led to his lynching, a brutal death that helped fuel the civil rights movement.
Last week, a team of family members searching files in Greenwood, Mississippi, found an arrest warrant for the abduction of Carolyn Bryant Donham, the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation said. Donham, who could not be found on Thursday, claimed in 1955 that Till had touched her and sexually approached her.
“Obey the order!” the organization posted on Instagram with a photo of the order.
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Duke University professor Timothy Tyson mentions the order in a 2017 book, writing that days after the murder, the local sheriff told reporters he did not want to “disturb the woman” by serving her because she is the mother of two little boys.
Last year, the US Department of Justice said it had failed to prove Donham lied about Till, although the ministry said it had “significant doubts about the veracity of its version of events”. Read more
The Justice Department has closed an investigation without charge, launched after the publication of Tyson’s book, in which he wrote that Donham told him in 2008 that parts of her testimony about Till were false.
On August 28, 1955, Till, visiting from Chicago, was beaten, shot, and maimed in Money, Mississippi, four days after Donham accused him of whistling at her. Donham later accused Till of grabbing her by the waist and making sexual remarks.
Till’s mother’s decision, Mamie Till Mobley, to hold an open coffin burial showing her son’s tortured body was a stimulating moment in the nation’s civil rights movement.
The order of August 29, 1955, ordered Donham, her then-husband Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, JW Milam, to be arrested for kidnapping.
An all-white jury later acquitted the two white men of Till’s murder. The men later admitted in an interview for a paid magazine. Bryant died in 1994 and Milam in 1981.
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Report by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Edited by Donna Bryson and Matthew Lewis
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