The US Department of Justice announced on Monday that it had closed the flagship investigation into the 1950s murder of a black teenager, Emmett Till, in Mississippi, who has become a symbol of the African-American battle for their civil rights.
The ministry had reopened the investigation into the case in 2018 following the release of The Blood of Emmett Till, written by Duke Timothy Tyson of Duke University.
In it, Tyson reports that Carolyn Bryant Donham, a white woman who testified at the Till murder trial in 1955 that a 14-year-old African-American man made sexually explicit remarks, recounted in an interview with her in 2008 and said that some excerpts of her testimony was false.
However, the Ministry of Justice, after examining the case, did not find enough evidence to prove that Donham did indeed “tell the professor that part of her testimony is not true.”
“By closing the case without prosecution, the government does not take the view that the testimony given by the woman in 1955 was true or accurate,” the ministry said.
“There are still serious doubts about the credibility of her version of events, which is disputed by those who were with Till when the incident happened, as well as the testimony of a witness who remains alive,” he added.
Till, who was visiting relatives in Chicago from Mississippi, was abducted, beaten, shot and maimed four days after the incident with Donham, who was then 20 years old. His body was found 72 hours after he was abducted in a river.
The woman initially stated that Till whistled at her and later added that he tried to grab her by the waist and made sexually explicit comments.
Till’s mother had demanded that her son’s coffin be opened at the funeral so that people could see what he had suffered. Photographs of his mutilated corpse have gone down in history.
Roy Bryant, then Donham’s husband, and J.’s half-brother. Ου. Milam was charged with killing Till, but the two men were acquitted by a jury of only whites.
The two later confessed in an interview with a magazine that they abducted and killed the teenager. The two men died in 1994 and 1998 respectively.
“I’m not surprised, but my heart is broken,” said Till’s cousin, Thelma Wright Edwards, 90, following the announcement of the Justice Department ruling.
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