Carolyn Bryant Donham — the white woman who accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of making improper advances towards her resulting in his brutal murder — has died. She was 88.
Donham was reportedly in hospice suffering from cancer before passing away on April 25 in Westlake, Louisiana.
Emmett Till was a teenager from Chicago visiting his family in Mississippi in 1955 when he went into a grocery store where Donham worked in the town of Money. According to Emmett’s cousin, Rev. Wheeler Parker, Emmett whistled at Donham.
Related: ‘Serve It and Arrest Her’: Emmett Till Accuser is Reportedly Cancer-Stricken, Living in Kentucky While Status of Warrant Still Looms
Donham’s then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, kidnapped and viciously beat Emmett before lynching him for making a pass at his 21-year-old wife. The men kidnapped another Black boy off the road before Donham advised them they had the wrong boy.
“That’s not the n—–! That’s not the one,” said Donham.
The men threw the boy from the truck, resulting in him breaking his front teeth. After bursting into Emmett’s family’s home and grabbing the teenager from his bed, Milam told Emmett’s uncle, Moses Wright, “If this is not the right boy, then we are going to bring him back. If it is not the right boy, we are going to bring him back and put him in the bed.”
Wright then heard a woman’s voice believed to be Donham’s, reply “Yes” when asked if Emmett was the boy who had whistled at her. The men later tortured and killed Emmett.
Emmett’s mother Mamie Till insisted that her son’s casket be left open at this funeral so the world could see what the murderers did to her son. Emmett was beaten, shot in the head, tied to a cotton gin fan with barbed wire, and later dumped in the Tallahatchie River.
The men were arrested and later acquitted by an all-white jury. The two men confessed years later in an article published…
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