By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
A search team has found the unserved warrant charging a white woman in the 1955 kidnapping of Emmett Till.
The Associated Press reported that the team searched a Mississippi courthouse basement for evidence about the African American teenager’s lynching, and now relatives of the victim want authorities to finally arrest the woman nearly 70 years later.
A warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant Donham — identified as “Mrs. Roy Bryant” on the document — was discovered last week by searchers inside a file folder that had been placed in a box, Leflore County Circuit Clerk Elmus Stockstill told The Associated Press.
Stockstill told the outlet that documents are kept inside boxes by decade, but there was nothing else to indicate where the warrant, dated Aug. 29, 1955, might have been. “They narrowed it down between the ’50s and ’60s and got lucky,” said Stockstill, who certified the warrant as genuine.
In March, President Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022, which makes lynching a federal hate crime. Earlier, the bipartisan measure passed both chambers of Congress.
Named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American savagely murdered by a group of white men in Mississippi, the legislation received push back from three Republicans – Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Chip Roy of Texas. Each were the lone votes against the bill.