A senior living facility in North Carolina was flooded with protesters in search of Carolyn Bryant Donham, who accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of making improper advances prior to his kidnapping and murder in 1955.
The group of activists was hoping for a face-to-face with Donham, who would now be in her 80s. They traveled to at least two separate locations in Raleigh on Wednesday with the hopes that local law enforcement would agree to extradite her back to Mississippi should they be able to find her.
“I do understand that Ms. Bryant is in her mid- to late-80s, but understandably, this is a crime she committed when she was 22,” one protester, identified only as Monte, told WRAL. “Sixty years later, it’s time for her to be held accountable.”
It comes after an unserved warrant for Donham’s arrest, dated Aug. 29, 1955, was discovered stashed inside a box in the basement of a Mississippi courthouse last month.
The discovery has sparked renewed calls for justice in Till’s brutal death as well as the arrest of Donham, who at the time of the slaying was married to one of two men tried and acquitted in connection with the teen’s death.
Donham, who is white, said Till whistled at her while she worked in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi, on Aug. 24, 1955, a move that clearly violated the state’s racist social codes in place at the time. Two days later, her then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, showed up armed at the rural Leflore County home of Till’s great-uncle, Mose Wright, and abducted the teen.
His brutalized body was later pulled from a river in a nearby county.
“We command You To Take the Body of J W Milam, Roy Bryant, and Mrs. Roy Bryant if to be found in your County … to answer the State of Mississippi on a charge of Kidnapping,” according to the decades-old warrant recently published by the Mississippi Free Press.
Bryant and Milam were acquitted of murder but later confessed to the killing in a magazine interview. They were protected from prosecution through double-jeopardy rules.
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