Editorial: Emmett Till, and Mamie Till Mobley, still await justice

Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago whose body washed up in the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi in the summer of 1955.

Sent down by his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, by train to spend the summer with relatives, Till found his way to Roy Bryant’s Meat and Grocery Store in Money, Mississippi. What exactly happened in that store is not entirely clear. The most common description is that Till whistled at a white woman, but his now-deceased mother told the Tribune in 1999 that Till had a stutter and would merely have been trying to speak.

But it’s clear that Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam, later abducted Till, beating and murdering the boy, before dumping his body.

Despite a sham trial for Bryant and Milam (who, years later, seemingly confessed in a magazine article), Till Mobley, a longtime resident of Chicago’s South Side, refused to be silent. She famously insisted on an open-casket funeral, even as Pullman porters and others distributed the news of the atrocity, as printed in the Chicago Defender, throughout the South. America was fundamentally changed.

All of this history is back in the news again for two reasons. The first is that an unserved warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham — aka “Mrs. Roy Bryant” — has been found stuffed away in the basement of a Mississippi courthouse. The second is that a memoir by Donham, the woman who accused Till of making advances, has surfaced. In the memoir, Donham claims she did not identify him to the killers and that she tried to protect Emmett from death.

The AP reported that the contents of the dictated, unpublished manuscript, titled “I Am More Than a Wolf Whistle,” were first reported by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. A writer named Timothy Tyson interviewed Donham, who is now 87, and got his hands on a copy. He just made the document public to build the argument against following through on that arrest warrant.

In essence, Donham said that after Bryant and Milam brought Till to her for identification in the middle of the night, she demurred: “I tried to protect him by telling Roy that ‘He’s not the one. That’s not him. Please take him home.’”

This is our reaction to Donham’s claim: Tell it to a judge and jury.

There is an unserved arrest warrant out for Donham, who was involved in a heinous American crime. Sure, it was nearly 70 years ago now. But that doesn’t change the reality that justice has yet to be served.

Till, a Chicagoan, deserves that justice. So does his remarkable mother, who worked tirelessly for years to bring people to account for Till’s murder and yet who died without anyone being convicted of causing her son’s death.

Donham, who claims to be a victim herself, is entitled, like all Americans, to the presumption of innocence. And we suspect that many in Mississippi will argue that sleeping dogs should be allowed to lie.

Nonsense. There was enough evidence to serve that warrant in 1955 and there is enough evidence to serve it now.

Till’s relatives and others have been digging into basements, shedding light and striving for justice.

Bryant and Milam have been dead for years. But Donham is alive and she should stand trial.

A fair one. Utterly unlike what was afforded to Emmett.

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