A cousin of Emmett Till is hoping her federal lawsuit will force a Mississippi sheriff to arrest the woman responsible for his kidnapping and death. News of the lawsuit comes a little over a year after the U.S. Justice Department announced the conclusion of its most recent investigation into the young man’s 1955 lynching, culminating without anyone being charged or arrested.
On Tuesday, Feb. 7, Patricia Sterling of Jackson, Mississippi, filed a federal lawsuit against Sheriff Ricky Banks of Leflore County. The complaint, according to The Associated Press, seeks to force Banks to serve Carolyn Bryant Donham a warrant related to Till’s disappearance and slaying.
A core element pushing Sterling’s lawsuit is the June 2022 emergence of an unserved 1955 arrest warrant for “Mrs. Roy Bryant,” Bryant Donham’s name from that time. Researchers found the warrant in a file folder in a Mississippi courthouse, according to a Leflore County Circuit Clerk named Elmus Stockstill.
In August 1955, Bryant Donham, then known as Bryant, told her husband a Black boy flirted with her while she was working as a cashier at a store in Money, Mississippi. The boy was the 14-year-old Till, who had come from Chicago for the summer to visit family in Mississippi.
Shortly after that Till was kidnapped in the middle of the night from his uncle’s home by a party that included several men and a woman who was identified as the person who pointed out Till to the men as the boy they were seeking. This woman is alleged to be Bryant Donham. Till was taken away and tortured and lynched that night.
The recently recovered arrest warrant actually was publicized in 1955. At that time, the then-Leflore County sheriff said to the press he did not want to “bother” her because she was a mother with two young children that needed to be raised.
Weeks later here was a highly publicized trial for the lynching, where Carolyn Bryant’s husband Roy Bryant and his…
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