A US jury has decided not to indict a woman accused of complicity in the 1955 lynching of a black teenager that became a symbol of the civil rights struggle, a Mississippi prosecutor said Tuesday. “The grand jury has determined that there is insufficient evidence to convict,” Carolyn Bryant, 88, said in a press release in the case of the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till nearly 67 years ago, according to Leflore County District Attorney Dewayne Richardson. Witnesses “with direct knowledge of the case” and investigators were heard for more than seven hours, he said.
Lynching, a federal crime
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black teenager from Chicago, was kidnapped, tortured and killed in Mississippi, a segregationist southern state, in 1955 while he was visiting family members. Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year-old white woman at the time, claimed he hissed at her and tried to grope her. Following his allegations, the teenager was kidnapped. His body was found in a river 72 hours later. Emmett Till’s mother had requested that his coffin be left open at his funeral so the world would see the abuse he had suffered. The photos of the mutilated corpse went down in history.
Roy Bryant – Carolyn Bryant’s husband – and JW Milam, his half-brother, were arrested for murder and acquitted by an all-white jury. Protected by this verdict, the two white men then told a magazine how they killed the teenager. You are now deceased. A team investigating the murder of Emmett Till found an arrest warrant for Carolyn Bryant in the basement of Leflore County Court in June. The warrant had never been executed, and its discovery revived the prosecution.
Previously, in 2004, the Justice Department reopened the investigation but was unable to prosecute due to statutes of limitations. The author of a book dedicated to the case had assured in 2017 that Carolyn Bryant had confessed to him that he had never been attacked by the boy. The Justice Department reopened the case, but its investigators could not determine whether or not she fabricated her attack, and the investigation was dropped again in December 2021. In March, US President Joe Biden signed the Emmett-Till Act, making lynching a federal crime and punishable by up to 30 years in prison.