A Mississippi grand jury has decided not to indict the white woman, now in her 80s, whose lie is said to have motivated the mob that killed 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, prosecutors announced on Tuesday.
Till, a Black boy from Chicago, was visiting family in Mississippi when he is said to have whistled at Carolyn Bryant Donham on a trip to the store she worked at. According to a Vanity Fair profile of author Timothy Tyson's effort to catch up with Donham years after Emmett’s death, Donham was married to Roy Bryant at the time, who with his half-brother J.W. Milam, was accused of lynching and brutally beating Emmett to death. Donham's court testimony helped free the men.
Donham told Tyson when she was 72 years old that she made up much of her testimony. Since then, Till's relatives were able to unearth from court documents an unserved warrant for Donham dating back to 1955. They had hope it would finally lead to jail time for Donham.
Although Roy Bryant and Milam were acquitted of murder charges, Donham was never arrested in Emmett’s death. Leflore County District Attorney Dewayne Richardson said in a news release obtained by The Associated Press that the grand jury determined, after upward of seven hours of testimony from witnesses and investigators, that the evidence to charge her now with kidnapping or manslaughter was insufficient.
RELATED STORY: Newly discovered warrant may inspire arrest of white woman whose lies likely sparked murder
The Emmett Till Legacy Foundation is still calling for Richardson to serve the warrant against Donham. The nonprofit tweeted: "#CarolynBryantDonham has still never been charged with a crime, despite the overwhelming new evidence that proves her culpability in the kidnapping of #EmmettTill."
Campaign Action
Rev. Wheeler Parker, Jr. told CBS News in a statement that the grand jury's decision is "unfortunate, but predictable."
"The prosecutor tried his best, and we appreciate his efforts, but he alone cannot undo hundreds of years of anti-Black systems that guaranteed those who killed Emmett Till would go unpunished, to this day," Parker said in the statement. "The fact remains that the people who abducted, tortured, and murdered Emmett did so in plain sight, and our American justice system was and continues to be set up in such a way that they could not be brought to justice for their heinous crimes."
President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law in March to officially make lynching a federal hate crime. It took some 67 years after Emmett's death.
RELATED STORY: 'Let the people see what they did to my boy': Mom's bravery nets law nearly 67 years after lynching
Biden said during a Rose Garden signing ceremony that 4,400 Black people were lynched between 1877 and 1950. “Lynching was pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone, not everyone belongs in America, not everyone is created equal,” the president said.
During the ceremony, Vice President Kamala Harris went off-script in talking about the "importance of the Black press" to "tell the truth when no one else is willing to tell it."
Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett's mother, had allowed Jet Magazine to take photos of Emmett's body before his funeral and share them with other news sources. "Let the people see what they did to my boy," she said after viewing her son’s body.
Many argue that act of courage catapulted the Civil Rights Movement.
"The newspaper coverage and murder trial galvanized a generation of young African Americans to join the Civil Rights Movement out of fear that such an incident could happen to friends, family, or even themselves," the Library of Congress reported in an article.
Warning: This video contains images of Till’s body after being lynched, which may be triggering for viewers.