Emmett Till, Carolyn Bryant Donham.Photo: AP/Shutterstock; Ed Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty
Mississippi’s top law enforcement official says she doesn’t plan to pursue criminal charges against Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman whose false allegations led to the lynching of Black teenEmmett Tillin 1955.
The Associated Press spokewith Michelle Williams, the chief of staff for Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office, who said there is “no new evidence to open the case back up.”
Williams also said Fitch’s office has had no contact with prosecutors in Leflore County, where Emmett’s abduction and murder took place during the summer of 1955.
Williams did not respond Monday to PEOPLE’s requests for comment. But her statement to the AP follows on the heels of the recent unearthing ofa decades-old unserved warrantfor Donham’s arrest.
It also comes days aftera copy of her sealed memoirwas provided to reporters. Claims in the unpublished manuscript seem to contradict claims Donham has made previously.
Emmett, who was from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Mississippi during the summer of 1955 when Donham, then 21, accused him of whistling at her and attempting to grab her hand and waist inside a store.
Days later, Emmett was kidnapped from a relative’s home, beaten severely, and mutilated before being shot. Afterwards, a large metal fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire and his body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River.
Donham’s husband at the time, Roy Bryant, and Bryant’s half-brother, J.W. Milam, were tried for Emmett’s murder, and an all-white jury acquitted them in September 1955 after an hour of deliberations.
In a magazine interview after the trial, both men admitted killing the boy.
Emmett’s death would become one of the catalysts for the civil rights movement.
In 2007, Donham recanted part of her story, telling Timothy B. Wilson for his book,The Blood of Emmett Till, the teen never touched her or harassed her verbally.
While she said in a 2017 interview that Emmett never touched or made sexual advances toward her, in the unpublished memoir, she claims the murdered boy did those things. The AP has reported that she also claims in the book — titledI am More Than A Wolf Whistle— that she tried helping Emmett.
She claims in the manuscript that a fearless Emmett spoke up and identified himself, and was then dragged away at gunpoint.
Donham wrote in her memoir that she “always felt like a victim as well as Emmett” and “paid dearly with an altered life” for what happened to him. “I have always prayed that God would bless Emmett’s family. I am truly sorry for the pain his family was caused,” she writes toward the end of the book.
The memoir is kept at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where it remains under seal until 2036.
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Donham has made no comment on Emmett’s family’s recent calls for her arrest.
PEOPLE has been unable to locate her for comment.
source: people.com
