A cousin of Emmett Till, the young black boy lynched in 1955 for approaching a white woman in Mississippi, filed suit in federal court demanding that a recently discovered arrest warrant from the era be served on the woman.
Till, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955 when he was brutally killed.
Accounts of the events differ, but witnesses said Till whistled at a white woman, now known as Carolyn Bryant Donham, at a store. Donham testified at trial that Till grabbed and threatened her. After the alleged whistling incident, which violated the unspoken social code of the day in the Jim Crow South, Donham’s then-husband, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milan, both now deceased, abducted Till, torturing and killing him before throwing his body into the Tallahatchie River. Bryant and Milan were acquitted of murder by an all-white jury but later confessed to the crime in a Look magazine interview….