Last year, for the second time, the Department of Justice announced that it was closing the case on one of the most horrific acts of racial violence in American history. But Watts, Till’s cousin and a co-founder of the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation; Hill, counsel to the family, and Beauchamp, a filmmaker and documentarian, have kept a foot in the door, and they refuse to accept the DOJ’s decision to close the case.
The two men cited on the warrant are dead, but the woman, now Carolyn Bryant-Donham, is still alive, in her 80s, and rumored to be living somewhere in North Carolina. Both Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all-white male jury and later confessed they murdered Till to author William Bradford Huie for a payment of $4,000.
Moreover, Killinger added in an email, “This is not the only new information which has surfaced since I presented the results of the FBI’s 2004-2006 investigation to a Mississippi Grand Jury in 2007, and they returned a No Bill. We also now know that Carolyn Bryant admitted to her attorneys in 1955 that Emmett Till was brought to her in the night—which corroborates information presented to the Grand Jury in 2007.