US ends investigation into infamous killing of 14-yr-old Black teen Emmett Till in 1955

The United States Justice Department on Monday said that it is ending the investigation into the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till following the meeting between the head of the department’s civil rights division and Till’s relatives. Emmett Till was a Black teenager from Chicago who was abducted, tortured and killed after witnesses claimed that he whistles at a white woman in Mississippi. 

While the Justice Department called Till’s murder “one of the most infamous acts of racial violence in our country’s history,” it added that the investigation into the incident was now closed. Till’s family members expressed disappointment in the decision saying that there will continue to be no accountability for the infamous killing. Notably, there are no charges against Carolyn Bryant Donham who was accused of lying about whether Till touched her.

“Today is a day we will never forget,” Till’s cousin, the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., said during a news conference in Chicago, as per AP. “For 66 years we have suffered pain…I suffered tremendously.”

All about Emmett Till’s infamous killing

The killing of Emmett Till had galvanized the civil rights movement after her mother insisted on an open casket, and Jet magazine published the images of his brutalised body. Describing the entire case, US Justice Department stated that in the summer of 1955, the 14-year-old Till had travelled from Chicago to Money in Mississippi to visit relatives. But on 24 August of that same year, Till along with six other youths drove to a store in Money. Contrary to the long-standing belief that Till was challenged to speak to or flirt with a white woman at the store, the Black teenager had bought some items in the store and left with one of his companions without the incident.

US Justice Department added, “According to this witness, the woman then left the store, unhurried and undisturbed, at which time Till whistled at her. Till’s companions, aware of the dangers posed to Black men perceived to have violated the unwritten, racist code prevalent in the Jim Crow South, hurried to get Till away from the store.”

Days after the incident at the store, on 28 August Roy Bryant, his half-brother John William (J.W.) Milam and at least one other person abducted Till from the home of his relatives. Three days after the abduction, Till’s brutally beaten body was discovered by a teenager fishing in the Tallahatchie River, floating in the river. It is also known that Till’s “assailants” had weighed him down with a 75-pound cotton gin fan, which was tied to the teenager’s body with barbed wire. 

While Bryant and Milam were charged with murder, they were acquitted by an all-white jury. Following the acquittal, both the charged white men “confessed to kidnapping and murdering Till in an account published in Look magazine in January 1956.” Later, new information emerged that the woman confessed to a professor that she gave an untrue account to the court. 

The Justice Department had reopened the investigation after a book published in 2017 quoted Donham’s confession about lying that Till grabbed her, whistled and made sexual advances while she was working in the store. Officials also said that historian Timothy B. Tyson, the author of 2017′s “The Blood of Emmett Till,” could not produce any recordings or transcripts in which Donham allegedly admitted to lying about her encounter with the Black teenager.

“In closing this matter without prosecution, the government does not take the position that the state court testimony the woman gave in 1955 was truthful or accurate,” the Justice Department release said. “There remains considerable doubt as to the credibility of her version of events, which is contradicted by others who were with Till at the time, including the account of a living witness.”

Image: AP