Post by trueblue on Aug 14, 2022 15:34:55 GMT
By her own telling, Mississippi authorities provided Carolyn Bryant Donham with preferential treatment rather than prosecution after her encounter with Emmett Till led to the lynching of the Black teenager in the summer of 1955.
Instead of arresting Donham on a warrant that accused her of kidnapping days after Till’s abduction, an officer passed along word that relatives would take her and her two young sons away from home amid a rising furor over the case, Donham said in a 2008 memoir made public last month. The sheriff would later claim Donham, 21 at the time, could not be located for arrest.
Once her husband and his half-brother were jailed on murder charges in Till’s death, she said in the unpublished manuscript, two men with the sheriff’s office drove her and her sister-in-law to the lockup for a relaxed visit outside their cell and even ferried the women back home. Later, before their murder trial, the men somehow were allowed to attend a family dinner without guards, she said.
Instead of arresting Donham on a warrant that accused her of kidnapping days after Till’s abduction, an officer passed along word that relatives would take her and her two young sons away from home amid a rising furor over the case, Donham said in a 2008 memoir made public last month. The sheriff would later claim Donham, 21 at the time, could not be located for arrest.
Once her husband and his half-brother were jailed on murder charges in Till’s death, she said in the unpublished manuscript, two men with the sheriff’s office drove her and her sister-in-law to the lockup for a relaxed visit outside their cell and even ferried the women back home. Later, before their murder trial, the men somehow were allowed to attend a family dinner without guards, she said.
“I was shocked! How in the world were they released from jail to come to eat supper with us? I didn’t see who dropped them off or picked them up to return them to jail, but we had a wonderful evening together,” Donham recalled in the memoir, written by her daughter-in-law based on the older woman’s words.