Emmett Till’s Story, Despite New Revelations, Still Needs the Whole Truth
Like a slowly unfolding detective story, the search for justice for Emmett Till keeps taking new and painful turns — and not always toward justice.
The latest comes from an unpublished memoir by the white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, whose accusations of improper advances in the store where she worked in Money, Mississippi, triggered the 1955 kidnapping and killing of Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago who was in town visiting relatives.
In a scene all too common in the post-Reconstruction South, a group of white men came after dark and took Till away. His body, brutally beaten, was found days later in the Tallahatchie River with a heavy cotton gin fan tied on his neck with barbed wire.
Two white men — Donham’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam — were charged and later acquitted by an all-white jury after less than an hour of deliberations.
Two years later, they would essentially confess in a Look magazine interview, but double jeopardy would not allow them to be tried again. They died as free men.
But, unlike the more than 4,700 other lynchings recorded by the NAACP before 1968, Till’s death stirred a historic outpouring of grief after his mother insisted that Emmett’s casket be left open, as she explained, so the world could see what had been done to her son.
After Chicago-based Jet magazine, the Chicago Defender and other Black publications ran the photos and story, thousands of mourners lined up around the block at the A.A. Rayner Funeral Home on the South Side to pay respects and force outrage. The historic casket would later find an appropriate resting place in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American Art and Culture in Washington.
But when the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. attorney’s office for the northern district of Mississippi announced last week that the latest investigation was closed, it looked like another disappointing end to the long-running saga.
Still, the story would not die so abruptly. In June, Till’s family discovered an unserved arrest warrant on kidnapping charges for Donham.
And, the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting has obtained a copy of her unpublished memoir in which her claims contradict those she’d made in the past.
...continued
(c) 2022 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
