A team searching the basement of a courthouse in Mississippi for evidence related to the lynching of Black adolescent Emmett Till has landed on an unserved warrant from 1955 for the arrest of a white woman.
According to a report by NBC, the investigators discovered a warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham inside a folder that had been put in a box, Leflore County Circuit Clerk Elmus Stockstill said on Wednesday.
Family members of the victim are now urging authorities to finally arrest Donham 67 years after Till was murdered.
“Serve it and charge her,” said Till’s relative Teri Watts.
In August 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till, who lived in Chicago, traveled to Mississippi to visit his relatives. On August 24, he entered a store in Money, Mississippi, which was owned by the family of Carolyn Bryant Donham, who accused Till of making lewd advances at her. One of Till’s cousins, Wheeler Parker, said that he saw that Till whistled at the woman, an act that resulted in Till’s killing, and subsequently turned into a nationwide outcry.
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Donham stated in her court testimony that Till grabbed her and made a sexually-inappropriate remark.
Donham was married to Roy Bryant, who along with his half-brother J.W. Milam, kidnapped Till, murdered him, and then dumped his body in a river. Bryant, Milam and Donham were all acquitted in the case, just weeks after the teenager’s death.
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The hate crime fueled the civil rights movement, especially after Till’s mother decided to open his casket so mourners, as well as the rest of the world, could witness his tortured corpse.
Today, Donham is in her 80s, leading a quiet life somewhere in the state of North Carolina, away from the calls for her prosecution.