A relative of Emmett Till has filed a lawsuit seeking the arrest of the white woman whose allegations resulted in the 14-year-old Black boy’s kidnapping, torture and murder nearly 70 years ago.
Earlier this week, Till’s cousin, Patricia Sterling, filed a federal lawsuit against Ricky Banks, the sheriff in Leflore county, Mississippi, seeking to compel the elected official to serve a 1955 arrest warrant against Carolyn Bryant Donham, who was then identified as “Mrs Roy Bryant” on the document.
A team searching for evidence surrounding Till’s lynching discovered the arrest warrant last year in a Mississippi courthouse basement. The team included members of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation as well as a few relatives of the group’s namesake.
“We are using the available means at our disposal to try to achieve justice on behalf of the Till family,” Sterling’s attorney, Trent Walker, said to the Associated Press.
In August 1955, Till was visiting family in Mississippi when he was accused by Donham – then 21 – of making lewd comments and grabbing her in a family grocery store in Money, Mississippi.
Evidence indicates a woman, possibly Donham, identified Till to the men who went on to abduct him and brutally murder the child, the Associated Press has reported.
Till was severely beaten, and his attackers dumped his body in a river. His mutilated and disfigured corpse was later found in a river a few days after his abduction.
Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, decided to leave her son’s casket open during his funeral in Chicago, in turn triggering nationwide outrage and fueling the civil rights movement.
Donham, along with her then-husband Roy Bryant and her brother-in-law JW Milam, were charged with Till’s abduction, according to the unserved 1955 arrest warrant.
The arrest warrant against Donham was released publicly at the time. However, the Leflore county sheriff at the time told reporters he did not want to “bother” Donham since she had two young children to care for, according to the Associated Press.
Bryant and Milam, who were tried for murder and then acquitted by an all-white jury, later confessed to Till’s killing in a magazine interview months later. They have both since died.
According to an unpublished memoir by Donham that was reviewed by the Associated Press, she said that she was unaware of what would happen to Till. She claimed that she had tried to deny his identity when Till was brought to her by the two men but that Till allegedly went on to identify himself.
The US justice department announced in December 2021 that it was closing its investigation into Till’s lynching.
Less than a year later and after the discovery of the unserved arrest warrant, a grand jury in Mississippi refused to indict Donham, citing an apparent lack of evidence.
“But for Carolyn Bryant falsely claiming to her husband that Emmett Till assaulted her, Emmett would not have been murdered,” according to the recent lawsuit filed by Sterling.
“It was Carolyn Bryant’s lie that sent Roy Bryant and JW Milam into a rage, which resulted in the mutilation of Emmett Till’s body into [an] unrecognizable condition,” it added.
Donham, now 89, has lived in Kentucky and North Carolina in recent years and has not publicly spoken about the calls for her arrest.
