A North Carolina District Attorney Says She May Pursue Charges Against the Woman who Accused Emmett Till

Justice for Emmett Till may finally come, nearly seven decades after the teenager was abducted and brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly flirting with and whistling with a white woman.

That’s because an unconfirmed arrest warrant from 1955 for Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman who accused Till of flirting (a crime against Black men, at the time), was issued. appeared in the basement of a Mississippi courthouse this week.

The discovery prompted civil rights activists and Till’s extended family to urge district attorneys in Leflore County, Mississippi (where the incident occurred) and in Raleigh, North Carolina (where Donham was last known). must take action and arrest the 87-year-old woman.

“We will certainly see that she is brought to justice,” Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman told. News & Observers.

Both district attorneys will need to work together to arrest Donham, Freeman said, but she encouraged Mississippi authorities to do an “assessment” and find out exactly why Donham hasn’t been arrested all these years.

If an arrest and trial results, it’s true that Donham admitted to fabricating the charges that led to Till’s death, telling one historian in 2017, “there’s nothing that boy did. I can justify what happened to me.”

Until he was 14 when he was murdered.