The spirit of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy whose abduction and death was a pivotal point in the Civil Rights movement, may finally see justice.
An active warrant from 1955, the year he was lynched, has been discovered.
According to reports, Till’s family is asking for law enforcement to arrest Carolyn Bryant Donham, enforcing a 67-year-old warrant for her detainment for her participation in the murder of the young Chicago native. The woman is almost 90.
The relatives found the document in a Mississippi courthouse basement while looking for more information about Till’s case.
They discovered that the police suspected Donham, then 21 years old, had identified Till to her husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother John William Milam.
Bryant and Milam then snatched him out of bed while he was staying at his great uncle’s house.
Those men believed Emmett Till had whistled at Donham while she was working at the register of her family’s store in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955.
The men beat the boy so severely that he was barely recognizable by his family members during his open-casket funeral, which his mother insisted on having to show the brutality of the crime.
Bryant and Milam stood trial for Emmett Till’s murder, but an all-white jury acquitted them.
The newly discovered arrest warrant for Donham revealed she was wanted for kidnapping, but the warrant was never executed.
At the time, the Leflore County sheriff told reporters he wouldn’t bring her in because she was a mother of two young children, and they didn’t want to “bother” her.
Teri Watts, the daughter of Till’s cousin Deborah Watts, said they should “Serve it and charge her. This is what the state of Mississippi needs to go ahead [and do].”
