A Mississippi grand jury has declined to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman whose accusation led to the lynching and brutal murder of Black 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955.
A warrant for Donham’s arrest, filed nearly 70 years ago, was found in June in a courthouse basement but, after seven hours of testimony from investigators and witnesses, the grand jury decided there wasn’t sufficient evidence to indict her for kidnapping or manslaughter, a prosecutor announced Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.
The discovery of the unserved warrant re-ignited intense interest in the case, culminating in a bizarre episode in which dozens of protesters stormed an apartment and senior living facility in Raleigh, North Carolina, Donham’s last known address, to demand her arrest.
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The now-88-year-old Donham was later tracked down by the Daily Mail and photographed for the first time in nearly 20 years in a hospice facility in Kentucky, where she is battling cancer and blindness.
The frenzy came at the same time an unpublished memoir surfaced in which Donham wrote that she “did not wish Emmett any harm and could not stop harm from coming to him, since [she] didn’t know what was planned for him,” adding that she “always felt like a victim as well as Emmett.”
But the attention brought by the rediscovered warrant wasn’t enough to push the case forward. Michelle Williams, chief of staff in the Mississippi Attorney General’s office, told the Associated Press last month, “There’s no new evidence to open the case back up.”
The grand jury decision makes it extremely unlikely Donham will ever face persecution for her role in Till’s death.
The warrant was discovered in a Mississippi courthouse basement by a search team that included members of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, as well as Till’s cousin Deborah Watts and her daughter, Teri, who told the AP that officials need to “serve it and charge her,” and that “this is what the state of Mississippi needs to go ahead.”
The summer of his death, the Chicago-born Till had travelled to visit family in Money, Mississippi. Instead, the chance encounter with Donham led to Till’s abduction at gunpoint by her husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam. The two beat and mutilated Till before shooting him and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River. The pair were acquitted at trial but confessed just a year later to the crime in Look magazine.
Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, held an open casket funeral for her son, openly displaying the brutality of the South’s racism, a choice which electrified the country’s civil rights movement and changed history.
Read it at The Washington Post
