FBI Reopens Emmett Till Case, Which Sparked Civil Rights Movement

MONEY, MS — The federal government is reopening the investigation of the savage 1955 killing of Emmett Till in Jim Crow-era Mississippi after receiving “new information” about the slaying that helped inspire the civil rights movement. The investigation of the black teenager’s death was officially closed in 2007 after authorities said all of the original suspects were dead and a state grand jury failed to indict anyone.

Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago, was visiting a great uncle in Money, Mississippi, when he was accused of wolf-whistling a white shopkeeper, Carolyn Donham. Three days later, his body was found in the Tallahatchie River, weighted down with a cotton gin fan. Barbed wire was around his neck, his body was badly mutilated body and it was identified only by a ring on his finger.

Though his body was badly decomposed, Till’s mother held an open-casket funeral for her son to draw attention to her son’s murder and the depth of racial hatred in the Deep South.

The Justice Department didn’t specify in a March report to Congress, required annually under a law that bears Till’s name, what the “new information” might be, and declined to comment to the Associated Press.

However, a federal official familiar with the matter told the AP that investigators decided to re-examine the case based on information in a bombshell book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” released last year by historian Timothy B. Tyson. In it, the white woman who originally claimed Till grabbed her and sexually harassed her in her husband’s store admitted that she had lied about those claims.

Tyson told reporters Thursday that he was contacted by the FBI weeks after his book was published in January 2017, and he furnished them interview recordings and other research materials. He doesn't think his research alone would support new charges but said investigators may be able to link it to other material in their possession.

"It's possible that the investigation will turn up something. But there's nothing that I know of, and nothing in my research, that is actionable, I don't think," he said. "But I'm not an attorney or a detective."

Donham’s at-the-time husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were both acquitted in Till’s murder by an all-white, all-male jury, but later confessed in a magazine article that in the early morning hours of Aug. 28, 1955, that they snatched Till from his bed in his great uncle’s home, beat him with a gun before shooting him, and threw his weighted down body into the Tallahatchie River.

The two men were reportedly paid $4,000 for their participation in the article published in Look magazine.

Donham, who will turn 84 this month, lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, but a man who came to the door of her residence declined to comment to the AP about the FBI’s decision to reopen the case.

“We don’t want to talk to you,” the man said.

Deborah Watts, a cousin of Till and co-founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, told the AP she wasn’t aware the FBI was reopening the case, but said it was “wonderful.” She declined to discuss details.

“None of us wants to do anything that jeopardizes any investigation or impedes, but we are also very interested in justice being done,” she said.

According to trial transcripts released by the FBI a decade ago, Donham — Carolyn Bryant at the time — referred to Till by a racial slur and testified the young teen had grabbed her hand in the store and said, “How about a date, baby?”

She said she pulled away, but claimed the boy “caught me at the cash register” and put both hands around her waist and pulled toward her.

“He said, ‘What’s the matter baby, can’t you take it?’ ” she testified, also claiming that Till said “you don’t need to be afraid of me” because he had been “with white women before.”

That testimony, offered outside of the jury’s presence, was ruled inadmissible by the trial judge, but the jury acquitted the two men without it after about an hour of deliberation.

Tyson wrote in his book that Donham admitted not only that she hadn’t been truthful, but “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting.

A plaque marks the gravesite of Emmett Till at Burr Oak Cemetery May 4, 2005 in Alsip, Illinois. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)