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Duvalier Malone reflects on the recent death of Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman whose accusations led to the kidnapping, beating and lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Miss., in August 1955, writing that “her death reopens old wounds for the family and all of Black America simply because justice never came.”
Carolyn Bryant Donham’s legacy is “one of dishonesty and injustice” that “verifies that Mississippi coddles and protects white supremacy,” a lawyer for Emmett Till’s cousin Priscilla Sterling said in a statement after news of her death broke on Thursday.
Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman whose accusations led to the abduction and lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Miss., in August 1955, has died at age 88.
“Civil Rights era murderers still living among us should be hunted down in the same manner as Nazi War criminals,” Melva L. Bradford writes.
A Leflore County grand jury has yet again declined to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham for the 1955 abduction and lynching of Emmett Till, despite the discovery of an unserved arrest warrant in Donham’s name for kidnapping. The warrant dates back to the original investigation into the 14-year-old’s death, indicating that she was never arrested then.
Members of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation found an unserved 1955 warrant in the Leflore County Courthouse on June 21, 2022, for the arrest of suspects in the kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till. Leflore County native Dr. Emmitt Y. Riley III calls for accountability from District Attorney DeWayne Richardson and other Black political leaders, demanding them to “open a new investigation and finally move toward justice for Emmett Till.”
A group from the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation has uncovered the decades-old warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham, the wife of one of 14-year-old Emmett Till’s murderers in 1955.
Former FBI agent Dale Killinger was the lead investigator in the bureau’s 2004 investigation of the crime. After a screening of documentarian Keith Beauchamp’s “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till” at Southern University on June 20, 2022, Killinger acknowledged that the FBI had never even investigated the lynching of Emmett Till at all prior to 2004.
The family of Emmett Till is once again calling for justice, nearly 70 years past young Till’s vicious murder, tied to a cotton-gin fan in the Tallahatchie River. Gathering at the steps of the Mississippi State Capitol’s rotunda on March 11, speakers from Emmett Till Legacy Foundation called for charges against Carolyn Bryant, now Carolyn Bryant Donham,
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