You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Grand Jury Declines to Indict Woman for Role in Lynching of Emmett Till

HeadlineAug 10, 2022

In news from Mississippi, a grand jury has declined to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham for her role in the lynching of Emmett Till nearly 70 years ago. Till was a 14-year-old Black teenager who was brutally abducted, tortured and killed in Mississippi in 1955 after he allegedly whistled at Donham, a white woman who worked as a store clerk. Her husband and his half-brother were tried for Till’s murder and acquitted by an all-white jury. Earlier this year, a team searching for evidence in the Emmett Till case found an unserved warrant charging Donham in his kidnapping. On Tuesday, Emmett Till’s cousin and best friend, the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., responded to the news by saying, “The fact remains that the people who abducted, tortured and murdered Emmett did so in plain sight, and our American justice system was and continues to be set up in such a way that they could not be brought to justice for their heinous crimes.”

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top