Woman who set Emmett Till lynching in motion dies at 88: 'Justice was never done — now it's over'
The white woman whose accusations led to the brutal murder of Emmett Till has died at age 88.
Carolyn Bryant Donham, who claimed the Black teenager had wolf-whistled at her as she worked in a store in Mississippi in August 1955, had been suffering from cancer and was receiving end-of-life hospice care, reported Mississippi Today.
“[Some people] have been clinging to hope that she could be prosecuted," said Devery Anderson, the author of Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement. "She was the last remaining person who had any involvement. Now that can’t happen.”
"It’s going to be a wound, because justice was never done,” he added. “Some others were clinging to hope she might still talk or tell the truth. … Now it’s over.”
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Till had just turned 14 years old when he was taken from his relatives' home, where he was staying while visiting from Chicago, by Donham’s then-husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, who later admitted to beating and shooting the boy to death after they were acquitted by an all-white jury.
A majority-Black grand jury declined to indict Donham in 2007 following an intensive FBI investigation, and another grand jury did the same last year.
Donham wrote a 109-page memoir that remains sealed in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until 2036, but reporters have obtained a copy and found that her recollection contradicts her original statement to her husband's defense lawyer.
She originally had said Till was scared but unharmed when her husband asked her whether he was the Black man who had insulted her, but Donham wrote that the teen defiantly admitted to whistling at her, which matches a highly inaccurate magazine report about the case from the 1950s.
“His death was tragic and uncalled for beyond all doubt,” she wrote. “For that, I am truly sorry. If it had been within my power to change his fate, I would have done so.”