No new charges will be filed.
“In closing this matter without prosecution, the government does not take the position that the state court testimony the woman gave in 1955 was truthful or accurate,” the Justice Department release said. “There remains considerable doubt as to the credibility of her version of events, which is contradicted by others who were with Till at the time, including the account of a living witness.”
Timothy B. Tyson’s book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” features a quote from Carolyn Donham who said that she wasn’t telling the truth when she accused Till of grabbing her, whistling and making sexual advances. Tyson told reporters in 2018 that the FBI contacted him weeks after the book’s publication, and he provided them with interview recordings and other research, the AP reported.
Relatives of Donham, who is in her 80s, have refuted that she admitted lying about Till.
Till’s body was found weighed down with a cotton gin fan in the Tallahatchie River days after his murder. Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, two white men, were charged with murder about a month after Till’s killing.
An all-white Mississippi jury acquitted them of the charges, but they confessed to the murder months later during a paid interview with Look magazine. Bryant and Donham got married the year of Till’s death, according to the AP.
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.
The killing galvanized the civil rights movement after Till’s mother insisted on an open casket, and Jet magazine published photos of his brutalized body.
The Justice Department in 2004 opened an investigation of Till’s killing after it received inquiries about whether charges could be brought against anyone still living. The department said the statute of limitations had run out on any potential federal crime, but the FBI worked with state investigators to determine if state charges could be brought. In February 2007, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict anyone, and the Justice Department announced it was closing the case.
Update (12/06, 7:33 PM): This story was updated with a comment from the DOJ.
Bryant and Milam were not brought to trial again, and they are now both dead. Donham has been living in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The FBI in 2006 began a cold case initiative to investigate racially motivated killings from decades earlier. A federal law named after Till allows a review of killings that had not been solved or prosecuted to the point of a conviction.
The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act requires the Justice Department to make an annual report to Congress. No report was filed in 2020, but a report filed in June of this year indicated that the department was still investigating the abduction and killing of Till.
The FBI investigation has included a talk with the Reverend Wheeler Parker, who previously told the AP in an interview that he heard his cousin whistle at the woman in a store in Money, Mississippi, but that the teen did nothing to warrant being killed.
