Wake DA responds to calls to arrest Emmett Till’s accuser 67 years after his death

A white woman whose accusations led to the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till could still be arrested 67 years after the brutal killing, according to Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman.

But first she wants to hear from the district attorney in Leflore County, Mississippi.

Since the discovery of an old arrest warrant, activists and Till’s family members have been demanding Carolyn Bryant Donham, who reportedly lied about being grabbed by Till, be arrested for her role in his death.

The woman, now 87, lives in Raleigh, according to previous reports by The News & Observer.

In a phone interview, Freeman said she is waiting for direction from the Leflore County District Attorney’s office to determine what steps she can take. If the district attorney there plans to move forward, “we would certainly see that she is brought to justice,” she said.

“Ultimately the decision as to what happens in this matter is not one within my discretion or authority,” Freeman said. “To some extent, obviously, it would be inappropriate for me without actual verification and a request from that jurisdiction for me to take any action.”

Arrest warrant found

A search team with the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation found an unserved arrest warrant dated August 28, 1955, charging Carolyn Bryant Donham in Till’s kidnapping, according to a report by the Associated Press on June 29.

Donham, then 21, alleged Till whistled at her, made lewd comments and grabbed her waist in a family store in Money, Mississippi.

The warrant was found in a file folder in a box in the Leflore County Circuit courthouse, the same county where Till was murdered. According to reports by the Greenwood Commonwealth newspaper in Greenwood, Mississippi, the then-sheriff of Leflore County would not arrest Donham in 1955, who was married to one of Till’s assailants, Roy Bryant, because she was caring for two young children.

Freeman said she has the authority to issue a fugitive warrant, but only when the jurisdiction in which the case exists enters the information into the National Crime Information Center database.

Part of this process also requires that law enforcement officials in the other state confirm they are moving forward with a case and that they will extradite the individual, Freeman said.

“Those are steps that really have to happen prior to our office, or any office, issuing an order for arrest or a fugitive warrant,” she said. “I can say that if I were in the District Attorney’s office there in Mississippi I think the first thing I would be doing as my due diligence is to try and ascertain what exactly happened to that matter back in 1955.”

Freeman questions whether the warrant was really not served or if the records were just incomplete. She said the district attorney in Leflore County would need to build the record on what happened to the warrant.

While it is unclear if Donham still lives in Raleigh, Freeman said it is not uncommon for the DA’s office to become involved in cases where charges are pending in other states. She said she has not as a district attorney issued an arrest warrant in a case this old.

In her experience, courtrooms have old warrants in them.

“But I think the question then becomes, especially prior to computer records to see what happened with the case, I think what becomes a bigger challenge for the judicial officials and prosecutors in Mississippi is to go back and determine what, if any, agreement was reached at the time,” Freeman said. There could have been an agreement about Donham’s charge which could explain why she was never arrested.

‘Any type of justice is good’

On Friday afternoon, civil rights activist John Barnett held a press conference in front of the Wake County District Attorney’s Office in Raleigh to call for the Donham’s arrest.

Barnett, founder of the True Healing Under God activist group, said he plans to meet with Freeman to discuss what could be done. He was joined by several Black teenagers at the press conference, who he said he had met just before the conference.

“I think any type of justice is good justice,” Barnett said. “There’s a dark cloud over this country.”

He told reporters that he didn’t care that Donham would be 87.

“(Till) was 14 years old,” Barnett said. “Even if he did whistle [at her], does a whistling justify death? I don’t care if she’s 87, I don’t care if she’s 89 or 97, because at the end of the day I know [Till’s mother] died not knowing if her son was ever going to get justice.”

Tim Tyson, a senior research scholar at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, said he is glad for any justice that can be wrung out in Till’s case. His murder was one of the most graphic sparks that led to the Civil Rights Movement and the news traveled around the world when Mamie Till demanded to have an open casket for her son’s funeral in Chicago.

Tyson is one of the only historians to ever interview Donham about what happened between her and Till. She admitted that she lied about the details of the encounter between her and Till, he said.

“Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” Donham told Tyson in an interview, he wrote in his 2017 book, “The Blood of Emmett Till.”

Tyson said in his research for his book, he searched through years of documents in Mississippi but did not find an arrest warrant then.

“Old Southern courthouses are often a jumble, and things disappear,” Tyson said. The transcript of the September 1955 trial of Bryant and his brother-in-law J.W. Milam was also missing for nearly 50 years in Sumner, Mississippi, he said.

He also said the exact timing of Donham’s lie is often misunderstood. In his interview with Donham, she was not the person to tell her husband of the encounter with Till and it wasn’t until the trial weeks later when she told prosecutors that Till grabbed her waist.

“That doesn’t make what she did any less despicable,” he said.