1955 Warrant In Emmett Till Case Discovered, Family Wants It Served

America stays playing around in Black people’s faces.

Decades after the ruthless white supremacist killing of Emmett Till in Mississippi, Congress finally passed an anti-lynching law in 2020 in the 14-year-old’s name. In 2021, ABC announced its Women of the World docuseries based on the true story of Mamie Till-Mobley, who risked her life fighting for justice for her son.

Source: Chicago Tribune / Getty

And while all that is well and good, we still find ourselves wanting for one thing; someone to pay for Emmett’s death.

Well, it turns out that way back in 1955, the year a monstrous white woman called on her monstrous white relatives to torture and kill an innocent Black boy, a warrant for the arrests of those monsters had been signed. That warrant was never served.

According to the Associated Press, a team searching a Mississippi courthouse basement for new evidence regarding Emmett’s lynching found the unserved warrant charging the aforementioned white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham who’s now in her 80s, and Emmett’s killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam (who are both dead), in his kidnapping. Now, members of Emmett’s family are calling for the warrant to finally be served.

From AP:

A warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham — identified as “Mrs. Roy Bryant” on the document — was discovered last week by searchers inside a file folder that had been placed in a box, Leflore County Circuit Clerk Elmus Stockstill told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Documents are kept inside boxes by decade, he said, but there was nothing else to indicate where the warrant, dated Aug. 29, 1955, might have been.

“They narrowed it down between the ’50s and ’60s and got lucky,” said Stockstill, who certified the warrant as genuine.

The search group included Keith Beauchamp, the creator of The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till—a documentary that prompted a new Justice Department probe into Emmett’s killing, which ended in 2007 with no charges being filed—and two of Emmett’s relatives, Deborah Watts, who leads the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, and her daughter, Teri Watts.

“Serve it and charge her,” Teri told AP. “This is what the state of Mississippi needs to go ahead.”

So, why the hell was this warrant never served. Well, that brings us back to America playing in our faces.

According to AP, “the Leflore County sheriff told reporters he did not want to ‘bother’ the woman since she had two young children to care for.”

So, basically, a dead Black child didn’t matter so long as precious white children needed their racist white monster mommy to care for them.

Anyway, on Wednesday, the current Leflore County Sheriff, Ricky Banks, told AP he had no knowledge of the newly discovered warrant, but he “will see if I can get a copy of the warrant and get with the DA and get their opinion on it.”

Those murderous cave beasts could have been arrested all along. We probably shouldn’t hold our collective breath hoping Donham will finally be brought to justice for her role in Emmett’s death, but if not now, then when?