This case dates back 67 years. It caused waves of outrage over the rights of black people in America and ended with no charges against anyone involved. However, hitherto unknown documents have been discovered The US court was led to reopen the case.
In the summer of 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American living in Chicago, Illinois, visited family in Money, Mississippi, in the southern United States. It was there that Carolyn Bryant, then 21, accused Donham of harassing her with inappropriate words while she was alone in a grocery store.
The suspicion raised by the white woman was that her husband Roy Bryant and brother-in-law J.W. Milam until the night of August 28 that year. The two men beat, tortured and mutilated the young man before shooting him in the head. His body was found a few days later in the Tallahatchie River.
Both Bryant and Milam were arrested on suspicion of murder, but acquitted by an all-white jury — at a time in American history when the South was heavily segregated from black populations. Years later, the two admitted to killing Till in an interview with Look magazine, but were never brought to justice. Both are already dead.
A case that took on national proportions when Till’s mother chose to keep her son’s casket open during her funeral to decry the brutality of his injuries — a case that might have been lost to time had Donham’s arrest warrant not been executed.
The document, discovered by a team of investigators in the basement of a local courthouse in June, was never used because the sheriff at the time didn’t want to “bother” the mother of two. But it helped reopen the case and try Donham for crimes like kidnapping and murder.
Another piece of data that fueled the case was Dunham’s unpublished memoir, which was found in his home during the investigation. In the document, received by the company in July Associated Press, admits that he doesn’t know what will happen to him after the woman accuses him and argues with the two murderers that the young man they brought him to has molested him. Donham asserts that Till identified himself as the perpetrator.
The woman, now 87, was arraigned in court in LeBlore County. The prosecutor called investigators and witnesses to testify for more than seven hours. However, the grand jury in charge of the case found that there was insufficient evidence to convict Donham.
Till’s cousin, the Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr., lamented the jury’s decision, characterizing it as “unhappy but predictable.”
However, the young man’s death still stands today. Not only did it fuel the civil rights movement in the US, but US President Joe Biden signed a bill to make it a federal hate crime by no name, the first time the act was proposed, more than 100 years after its passage.
Dubbed the “Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act,” the bill would allow murderers to be prosecuted when their conspiracy to commit a hate crime results in death or serious bodily injury, says Rep. Bobby Rush, the bill’s sponsor. The law carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison and a fine.
Biden acknowledged the long delay in addressing lawmakers, government officials and civil rights advocates, emphasizing how the violent deaths of black Americans have been used to intimidate them and prevent them from voting because of their skin color.
“Thank you for never, ever giving up,” the head of state said. “This killing spree is pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone, not everyone, not in America, not everyone is created equal,” he added.
