RALEIGH, N.C. — In 1955, a white woman alleged that a Black teenager whistled at, grabbed and said obscene things to her in her grocery store in Mississippi. The result? A brutal kidnapping, beating and murder in the Jim Crow South.
The 14-year-old victim was Emmett Till, and his horrendous death was pivotal in the American civil rights movement.
Last month, a team of researchers and Till’s relatives found, in the basement of a Mississippi courthouse, a legitimate arrest warrant for the woman whose accusations led to his murder. The news has reignited interest in this gruesome event.
The woman, Carolyn Bryant, now Carolyn Bryant Donham, was last known to live in Raleigh. Civil rights activists are calling on the Wake County district attorney to arrest her.
Here are some answers to commonly asked questions about Till, his unjustified death and recent history of the case.
Who was Emmett Till?
Emmett Till was born on July 25, 1941, in Chicago. He was an only child, and he lived with his mother, his grandparents and cousins on the South Side. He had polio when he was young and a resulting speech impediment, The New York Times reported. Loved ones called him “Bobo.”
Till’s father, Louis, whom Emmett never knew, was executed at 23 years old after being accused of sexually assaulting and killing women in Italy during World War II.
Till’s mother, Mamie, at 2 years old, moved with her family from Mississippi to the Chicago area in 1924 as part of the Great Migration.
Till was 14 years old when he died.
How did Emmett Till die and who killed him?
In August 1955, Till left his home in Chicago to visit relatives in the Mississippi Delta. On Aug. 24, after picking cotton with his relatives, he went to a store run by a young white couple: Carolyn and Roy Bryant. Till went inside to buy bubble gum while Carolyn Bryant was working on her own, The Times reported.
Two teenagers said Till gave the money to the 21-year-old woman by putting it in her hand. White Mississippians expected Black people to put money on the counter to avoid physical touch, The Times reported.
In the 2017 book “The Blood of Emmett Till,” Carolyn Bryant said that she angrily went out to her car to get a gun from under the seat, when Till let out a “wolf whistle.”
The teenagers got nervous and quickly left the store.
Four days later, Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till at gunpoint from his Mississippi family’s home. Two of Till’s cousins witnessed the kidnapping, according to the Library of Congress.
Most believe that these two are responsible for the torture and murder, but multiple men and a woman were involved, the Mississippi Free Press reported.
At least two Black men kept Till from jumping off the back of the pickup truck he was held in, according to reports. Then, at least four white men beat Till and shot him in the head, murdering him. They tied a cotton gin fan to his body with barbed wire, and they threw his naked corpse into a bayou that led to the Tallahatchie River.
Journalist William Bradford Huie is said to have hidden the identities of additional murderers because he couldn’t get releases from all of them for his interview for “Look” magazine.
“As Dave Tell points out in his book, ‘Remembering Emmett Till,’ Huie needed releases from the murderers to indemnify Look magazine from litigation. But he couldn’t get four. He could only get two. So, he made his story fit his resources,” the Free Press wrote.
“He shrank the kidnapping and murder party to two and moved the murder scene as a consequence. So, instead of telling readers the truth — that Till’s lynchers killed him in a barn on a plantation run by Leslie Milam, a member of the killing party whom Huie concealed — he claimed J.W. Milam and Bryant beat Till near J.W. Milam’s home and shot him to death on the Tallahatchie River’s bank.”
A young fisherman found his corpse in the water a few days later. Till’s body was horrifically mutilated beyond identification, and it was only determined to be him by a silver ring on one of his fingers.
Why did Emmett Till have an open casket funeral?
Till’s mother’s decision to hold an open casket funeral, showcasing her son’s mutilated body, helped spur the American Civil Rights Movement.
“Let the world see what has happened, because there is no way I could describe this,” she said.
Photos of his disfigured face first appeared in Jet magazine, as a photographer attended the funeral and got permission to capture the open casket scene.
Rosa Parks, who famously refused to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama, said the photograph inspired her action.
“I thought of Emmett Till, and when the bus driver ordered me to move to the back, I just couldn’t move,” she said a few months after her historic decision began the Montgomery bus boycott in December 1955, a few months after Till’s death.
What happened to Emmett Till’s killers?
Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were charged with murder by state officials, according to the Department of Justice. They were tried the following month, and an all-white jury acquitted them.
No one else was ever indicted or prosecuted for the involvement of the kidnapping or murder, per the FBI.
“During the trial, the woman at the store testified under oath, but not in front of the jury, that Till had propositioned her and physically touched her hand, arm and waist while they were both inside the store,” per the Justice Department.
“Following their acquittals, both Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam confessed to kidnapping and murdering Till in an account published in Look magazine in January 1956.”
Roy Bryant died of cancer in August 1994, PBS reported. Milam died of spine cancer in 1980, USA Today reported.
Who is Carolyn Bryant Donham?
Little is known about Carolyn Bryant Donham, as she is known today, beyond the 1955 trial.
We know she divorced Roy Bryant in 1979, almost 15 years after the trial. She married twice after. She has two sons. She won beauty pageants in her youth.
She was interviewed by North Carolina author Timothy Tyson in 2008 and the account of that interview was published in his 2017 book, “The Blood of Emmett Till.”
Today, she’s 87 years old. She was last known to live in Raleigh.
Her memoir, “More than a Wolf Whistle: The Story of Carolyn Bryant Donham,” is in the Southern Historical Collection at the UNC-Chapel Hill library archives and won’t be available publicly until 2036 or her death.
Did Carolyn Bryant Donham recant her testimony?
This is unclear. The Department of Justice reopened the investigation into Till’s murder in 2017. In December 2021, they closed the investigation, saying they found insufficient evidence. (This is the second time they opened the case and closed it without further action — the first time was in 2004.)
Here’s the background: In 2017, new information emerged that Carolyn Bryant Donham may have told author and Duke professor Timothy Tyson that the account she gave the state court in 1955 was untrue.
The Justice Department, however, said she denied to the FBI that she ever recanted her testimony and gave no information beyond what was uncovered during the previous investigation. The FBI said they found no evidence of the retraction in Tyson’s recordings or transcripts. To read the full release by the Justice Department, visit justice.gov.
Still, the book claims that Donham recanted her 1955 testimony during a 2008 interview.
“But about her testimony that Till had grabbed her around the waist and uttered obscenities, she now told me, ‘That part’s not true,’” Tyson published. “If that part was not true, I asked, what did happen that evening decades earlier?”
“‘I want to tell you,’ she said. ‘Honestly, I just don’t remember. It was fifty years ago. You tell these stories for so long that they seem true, but that part is not true.’”
What did Carolyn Bryant Donham say in her original testimony?
In 1955, “she testified that Till had grabbed her hand forcefully across the candy counter, letting go only when she snatched it away. He asked her for a date, she said, chased her down the counter, blocked her path, and clutched her narrow waist tightly with both hands,” Tyson wrote in his 2017 bestselling book.
“She told the court he said, ‘You needn’t be afraid of me. (I’ve), well, — with white women before.’ According to the transcript, the delicate young woman refused to utter the verb or even tell the court what letter of the alphabet it started with. She escaped Till’s forceful grasp only with great difficulty, she said.”
Her testimony continued, Tyson wrote, “‘Then this other (N-word) came in from the store and got him by the arm. And he told him to come on and let’s go. He had him by the arm and led him out.’ Then came an odd note in her tale, a note discordant with the claim of aborted assault: Till stopped in the doorway, turned around and said, ‘Goodbye.’”
The judge dismissed the jury from the courtroom while Bryant spoke, claiming that her testimony was irrelevant to the actual murder, Vanity Fair reported. Court spectators heard her, and her testimony was put on record, as the defense wanted her words recorded for a possible appeal.
What is the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act?
The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, commonly shortened to the Emmett Till Act, was first passed in 2008. Its reauthorization was passed by Congress in 2016.
Before many Civil Rights laws were passed in the 1960s, hundreds of racially questionable crimes were committed in the United States, and very few of them were tried with legitimacy.
The Emmett Till Act allows the Justice Department and FBI to work with state and local law enforcement, as well as victims’ family members, to reopen long-closed cases in pursuit of truth and justice.
In 2006, the FBI began the Cold Case Initiative, which identified and investigated racially motivated murders committed decades ago. The initiative has the Justice Department and FBI work together to address violations of civil rights statutes ending in death that occurred before the year 1980.
What is the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation?
Members of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation were among the group that found the arrest warrant in that Mississippi courthouse basement on June 30.
This foundation, founded in 2005, is a nonprofit organization committed to preserving the legacy and memory of Till, as well as his mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s hope for justice.
The organization brings awareness to Till’s history and offers programs, opportunities, curriculums, support and scholarship, the foundation’s website says.
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