In 1955, an arrest warrant was issued for Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman who was offended by 14-year-old black boy Emmett Till and pointed him out to men who then brutally murdered him. The sheriff at the time says he didn't want to "bother" Donham with the warrant, and it soon vanished. But now the warrant has been found by researchers, and Till's family wants it acted upon.
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.
Donham, now 88, said she lied about Till, according to a reporter who did not record her statement. She denied doing so, however, after the Department of Justice began investigating it.