Carolyn Bryant Donham, the Caucasian lady whose accusation precipitated the 1955 lynching of Black adolescent Emmett Till in Mississippi – and whose involvement in the harrowing demise was reconsidered by a grand jury as recently as last year – has passed away in Louisiana, as confirmed by the Calcasieu Parish coroner’s office to CNN.
Donham, 88, departed this life on Tuesday in Westlake, according to a death notice from the coroner.
Malik Shabazz, affiliated with Black Lawyers for Justice, expressed in a statement on Thursday that Donham’s legacy “will be one of dishonesty and injustice.”
“Carolyn Bryant’s demise concludes a dolorous chapter for the Emmett Till family and for Black individuals in America. The tragic aspect of Bryant’s demise was her never being held accountable for her role in the demise of young Emmett Till, who stands as a martyr for the Civil Rights Movement,” the statement reads. In August 1955, 14-year-old Emmett was assaulted and fatally shot after purportedly whistling at Bryant – now Donham – in Money.
Subsequently, her spouse, Roy Bryant, and J.W. Milam, seized Emmett from his bed, directed him into the rear of a pickup truck, and subjected him to a beating before fatally shooting him in the head and discarding his lifeless form into the Tallahatchie River. They were both acquitted of homicide by an all-White jury following a trial during which Carolyn Bryant attested that Emmett had physically accosted her and verbally menaced her. Milam, who passed away in 1980, and Bryant, who expired in 1994, confessed to the killing in a 1956 interview with Look magazine.
In 2007, a Mississippi grand jury chose not to bring charges against Donham.
In 1955, Donham testified that Emmett seized her hand and waist, making advances and claiming to have been involved with “Caucasian women before.” However, years later, when Professor Timothy Tyson revisited that trial testimony in a 2008 interview with Donham, she asserted, “That part’s not true.”
This interview was featured in Tyson’s book, “The Blood of Emmett Till.” In a statement following Donham’s demise, Tyson remarked, “68 years ago, the unspeakable murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black lad from Chicago, occurred. It has been convenient for America to frame this as a tale of monsters, with her being one of them. However, the veracity is that what was truly unspeakable was the American social order that took no action regarding Emmett Till or the thousands more like him.”
The suggestion that the woman central to Emmett’s case had retracted her testimony – contradicting statements she made during the state trial in 1955 and later to the FBI, according to the US Justice Department – spurred calls for authorities to reopen the investigation.
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