Grand Jury Declines To Indict Woman Whose Accusations Led To Murder Of Emmett Till

Topline

A rural Mississippi grand jury decided not to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham for her connection to the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, multiple publications reported Tuesday, after the discovery in June of a decades-old unserved warrant for her arrest.

Key Facts

Testimony from investigators and witnesses lasted for seven hours, several outlets and NBC reported, but the grand jury decided that there was not enough evidence to indict Donham, 88, on charges of manslaughter and kidnapping, which carry up to 20 years in the state of Mississippi.

Donham accused Till of grabbing her and making lewd remarks, leading to his gruesome death at the hands of her husband, Roy Bryant, and brother-in-law J.W. Milam.

A federal investigation into Till’s case was launched in 2017 after a historian published a book in which he wrote that Donham had admitted to him her claims that Till had harassed her were untrue, but the Department of Justice announced in December that it had insufficient grounds to prosecute her.

KEY BACKGROUND

Till was a 14-year-old boy visiting family in Mississippi when Bryant and Milam fatally lynched him, one of many matches that lit the fire of the civil rights movement. The two white men were acquitted by an all-white jury–though they later admitted in a magazine interview they had killed him. In June, a 70-year-old warrant for the arrest of Donham on charges of kidnapping dated Aug. 29, 1955, was found in a Mississippi courthouse. A few weeks ago, several outlets obtained a copy of a 99-page, unpublished memoir by Donham that revealed inconsistencies with what she told investigators. Donham told investigators that Till didn’t speak when her then-husband brought the teenager to her, but in her memoir she wrote that she told her husband that Till wasn’t the person who had harassed her, to which Till replied, “Yes, it was me.”

TANGENT

A film about Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mosley, and her involvement in the civil rights movement after his death will be released in theaters this fall.

FURTHER READING

Grand jury declined to indict woman in Emmett Till killing (Associated Press)