Emmett Till case: DoJ reopen brutal murder investigation that helped inspire civil rights movement

The US government has reopened the investigation into the killing of black teenager Emmett Till, a 14-year-old who was slain in after allegedly flirting with a white woman.

Six decades after he was abducted, mutilated, shot and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River in Money, Mississippi, the Justice Department (JoD) revealed to Congress it was reopening the investigation after receiving “new information”.

It is unclear what the new information is, but the report sent to Congress by the DoJ followed the publication last year of The Blood of Emmett Till, a book that said a witness to the case admitted lying about events that preceded the killing of the youngster from Chicago, who was visiting family.

“The Till case has been re-opened by DOJ based upon the discovery of new information,” says the report, which was sent in March.

“Because the matter is ongoing, the department can provide no further information about the current investigation.”

Following the 1955 killing of the teenager, the boy’s mother insisted that at his funeral service his body be laid in an open casket so that people – an especially the world’s media – could witness the damage inflicted upon his face and body.

The DoJ declined to comment about the new information it had received on Thursday. However, Jerry Mitchell, a veteran reporter with the Jackson-based Clarion-Ledger who has covered many to the investigations and prosecutions of civil rights-era crimes, said he believed the decision to reopen the case followed the publication of the book, by researcher Timothy Tyson.

In it, Mr Tyson, a scholar at Duke University in North Carolina, quotes a white woman, Carolyn Donham, as acknowledging during a 2008 interview that she was not truthful when she testified that the teenager had grabbed her, whistled and made sexual advances at her in a store.

Two white men, Ms Donham’s then-husband Roy Bryant, and his half-brother JW Milam, were charged with murder but acquitted. The men later confessed to the crime in a magazine interview, but were not retried. Both are now dead.

The Associated Press said Ms Donham, who turns 84 this month, lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. A man who came to the door at her residence declined to comment about the FBI reopening the investigation, the news agency said. “We don’t want to talk to you,” the man said before going back inside.

Mr Mitchell said he believed the case of Mr Till continued to resonate in a way that some cases from that time did not.

“I think it was the first of the cases from the modern civil right era to crash into the public consciousness,” he told The Independent.

He said that following recent incidents in which young black men had been killed by the police, or by white people with guns, protesters frequently carried banners showing the face of Mr Till.

“After Trayvon Martin, [an unarmed 17-year-old who was shot dead in Florida in 2012 by a self-styled neighbourhood watch guard, George Zimmerman] you had protesters carrying images of Emmett Till wearing a hoodie,” he said, referring to the jacket that Mr Martin was wearing when he was fatally shot.

The AP said Deborah Watts, a cousin of Mr Till who runs the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, said she was unaware the case had been reopened until she was contacted by reporters.

“None of us wants to do anything that jeopardises any investigation or impedes, but we are also very interested in justice being done,” she said.

Relatives of Mr Till had pushed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reopen the case last year following publication of Mr Tyson’s book.

Ms Donham, then known as Carolyn Bryant and 21 years old at the time, testified in 1955 as a prospective defence witness in the trial of Bryant and Milam. With jurors out of the courtroom, she used a racial slur for a black man and said that person had taken her by the arm.

“Just what did he say when he grabbed your hand?” defence lawyer Sidney Carlton asked, according to a trial transcript released by the FBI a decade ago.

“He said, ‘How about a date, baby’,” she testified. She said she pulled away, and moments later the young man “caught me at the cash register”, grasping her around the waist with both hands and pulling her towards him.

A judge ruled the testimony inadmissible. An all-white jury freed her husband and the other man even without it. Testimony indicated a woman might have been in a car with Bryant and Milam when they abducted Mr Till, but no one else was ever charged.

In last year’s book, Mr Tyson said Ms Donham told him her testimony about Mr Till accosting her was not true.

She told him: ‘Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”