Emmett Till – Mississippi Officials Do Not Plan To Prosecute Accuser In Teen’s Lynching Case
Mississippi’s Attorney General has revealed she has no plans to make an arrest in Emmett Till’s murder case, a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955.
According to reports, the top law enforcement official in Mississippi says she doesn’t plan to purse criminal charges against Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman whose false accusations led to the lynching of Black teen Emmett Till.
According to the chief of staff for the Attorney General’s office, there is “no new evidence to open the case back up.” The chief of staff also noted that the AG’s office has had no contact with prosecutors in Leflore County, where Emmett Till’s abduction and murder took place during the summer of 1955.
As previously reported, Till’s family continues to fight for an arrest to be made in his murder. In June, a team searching for evidence in a Mississippi courthouse basement found an unserved warrant charging Carolyn Bryant Donham, 87, in Till’s 1955 kidnapping.
The Attorney General’s statements also comes days after a copy of Carolyn Bryant Donham’s sealed memoir was provided to sources. In the unpublished memoir, she claims she attempted to help Till once he’d been taken by her husband and brother-in-law and brought to her in the middle of the night for identification. Claims in the 99-page manuscript, titled “I am More Than A Wolf Whistle,” seem to contradict claims Donham has made previously.
As you may already know, Till was from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi when Donham, then 21, accused him of whistling at her and attempting to grab her hand and waist inside her family’s grocery store.
Days later, Till was kidnapped from a relative’s home, beaten severely, and mutilated before being shot. After the tragic killing, a large metal fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire and his body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River.
Donham’s then-husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted by an all-white jury in September 1955 for Till’s murder after an hour of deliberations. In a magazine interview after the trial, both men confessed to killing the boy.
