Relatives of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black man whose murder in Jim Crow South fueled the civil rights movement in the United States, say they have discovered an unserved arrest warrant for the white woman who accused him of coming on to her. , sparking the events that led to his death nearly 70 years ago.
“I cried. We cried. We hugged each other,” Till’s cousin Deborah Watts told CNN of the time she said members of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation found the order in a dusty, damp box at a county courthouse in Greenwood. , Mississippi. “Incredible. We hugged each other. Justice must be done.”
The warrant was discovered last week by a five-member search party led by members of Till’s family, including Deborah Watts and her daughter Terri. An image of the warrant, provided to CNN by the foundation, charged JW Milam, Roy Bryant and Bryant’s then-wife, identified in the document as Mrs. Roy Bryant, with kidnapping and ordered her arrest. The order is dated August 29, 1955 and signed by the Leflore County Clerk.
The two men were acquitted of Till’s murder shortly afterward by an all-white jury, though they later admitted to the murder in an interview with Look. magazine. Milam died in 1980 and Bryant died in 1994, but his widow, now Carolyn Bryant Donham, is still alive, and Emmett Till’s family hopes the warrant will lead to his arrest and ultimately justice. .
“Justice must be served,” Watts told CNN, adding, “Emmett led us into it. I know that in my heart.”
The warrant image shows that the current Leflore County Clerk certified the document as authentic on June 21.
The discovery of the order was first reported by the New York Amsterdam Newsone of the oldest African-American publications in the country.
According to The New York Times, an affidavit attached to the warrant said the three “willfully, unlawfully and criminally and without legal authority forcibly seized, confined and abducted” Emmett Till, though his last name was misspelled. A note on the back of the warrant says 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 uncovered the warrant.
Neither Donham nor the Leflore County Clerk’s Office have responded to CNN requests for comment.
THE PROFESSOR CLAIMED THE TESTIMONY OF DONHAM
While the murder of Emmett Till remains a milestone in America’s long fight against racial injustice and inequality, to this day no one has been held criminally responsible.
The 14-year-old from Chicago was visiting family in Mississippi when he had his fateful run-in with Carolyn Bryant, then 20. Accounts of that day differ, but witnesses allege that Till whistled at the woman at the market he owned with her husband in Money, Mississippi.
Roy Bryant and Milam then dragged Till out of his bedordered him to get into the back of a pickup truck and beat him before shooting him in the head and dumping his body into the Tallahatchie River. But both were acquitted of murder after a trial in which Carolyn Bryant testified that Till grabbed her and verbally threatened her. The jury deliberated for barely an hour.
In 2007, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Donham on the charges. And according to archived FBI documents, Milam and Roy Bryant were arrested on a kidnapping charge in 1955, but were not indicted by a grand jury. “The 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 Till grabbed his hand around his waist and propositioned him, saying he had been with “white women before”. But years later, when Professor Timothy Tyson raised that testimony at trial in a 2008 interview with Donham, he claimed she told him, “That part is not true.”
The possibility that the woman at the center of the Till case has recanted her testimony… that the US Department of Justice said in a memo that it would contradict statements he made during the state trial in 1955 and later to the FBI, prompted calls for authorities to investigate the case again.
The DOJ, which had already reexamined and closed the case in 2007, reopened investigation into Till’s murder in 2018. But the case was closed in december after The DOJ Civil Rights Division concluded that it could not prove that Donham had lied.. When asked directly, Donham flatly denied to investigators that he had recanted his testimony.
Till’s death drew attention far beyond Mississippi after a photo of his mutilated body was published in Jet Magazine and spread around the world. Her mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, had demanded that she have an open-casket funeral so that the entire world could see her son’s injuries and the results of racial terrorism, a decision that helped fuel the movement for civil rights.
However, Emmett Till’s legacy lives on: In March, the US. President Joe Biden signed the law the landmark Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which made lynching a federal hate crime.