Mississippi prosecutors recently said they don’t plan on pursuing Carolyn Bryant Donham–the white woman accused of setting off the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till in 1955.
According to the Associated Press, Mississippi’s top legal official delivered the sobering news on July 15, saying there was “no new evidence” to re-open Till’s case.
“There’s no new evidence to open the case back up,” the chief of staff for Attorney General Lynn Fitch, Michelle Williams, told the AP.
She added that Fitch’s office hadn’t been in contact with Leflore County District Attorney Dewayne Richardson–the prosecutor responsible for pursuing a case against Donham. In addition, Williams said that The Justice Department previously closed Till’s case in December after investigating it without filing charges.
Her statement arrived following a search team’s discovery of an unserved warrant that charged Bryant amidst Till’s family’s call for her arrest nearly 70 years since his death.
In April, reports indicated that the now-88-year-old woman was named in a kidnapping warrant that accused her, her then-husband Roy Bryant and her brother-in-law J.W. Milam in Till’s 1955 abduction. The 14-year-old’s body was discovered in Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River as he was viciously beaten, lynched, shot in the head, mutilated, and thrown in there in August 1955. Bryant and Milam were arrested and acquitted on murder charges, while Donaham was never taken into custody.
In Donham’s unpublished memoir obtained by the AP, she claimed she didn’t know what would happen to Till after she accused him of making advancements toward her during a time of racial hostility in the south. In the memoir manuscript, Donham even said that when Bryant and Milan brought the young teen to her so she should identify him, she denied it was Till in an alleged attempt to help him.
Till’s cousin, the founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, Deborah Watts, firmly believes that Donaham’s memoir and the unserved arrest warrant are new evidence that proves the accuser’s involvement in her relative’s case.
“I truly believe these developments cannot be ignored by the authorities in Mississippi,” Watts said.
Back in March, President Joe Biden signed the Emmet Till Anti-Lynching Bill, making the heinous act–which has been practiced in the U.S. for centuries–a hate crime.
