Global Courant 2023-04-27 21:33:17
JACKSON, Ms. (AP) — The white woman who accused black teen Emmett Till of making inappropriate advances before he was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 has died in a Louisiana hospice, a coroner’s report shows. Carolyn Bryant Donham turned 88.
Donham died Tuesday night in Westlake, Louisiana, according to a death report filed Thursday at Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office in Louisiana.
Till’s kidnapping and murder became a catalyst for the civil rights movement when his mother pushed for a burial in their hometown of Chicago after his battered body was retrieved from a Mississippi river. Jet magazine published photos.
Till traveled from Chicago in August 1955 to visit relatives in Mississippi. Donham – then 21 and named Carolyn Bryant – accused him of making inappropriate advances on her at a grocery store where she worked in the small community of Money. The Rev. Wheeler Parker, a cousin of Till’s who was there, has said that the 14-year-old Till whistled at the woman, an act that went against Mississippi’s racist social codes of the time.
There is evidence that a woman identified Till with Donham’s then-husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother JW Milam, who killed the teen. An all-white jury acquitted the two white men of the murder, but the men later confessed in an interview with Look magazine.
In a unpublished memoirs obtained by The Associated Press in 2022, Donham said she didn’t know what would happen to Till.
The contents of the 99-page manuscript, titled “I am More Than A Wolf Whistle,” were first reported by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. Historian and author Timothy Tyson of Durham, North Carolina, who said he obtained a copy from Donham during an interview with her in 2008, provided a copy to the AP.
Tyson had placed the manuscript in a University of North Carolina archive with an agreement that it would not be made public for decades, though he said he gave it to the FBI during an investigation the agency concluded in 2021. it became public after people investigating at the Leflore County Courthouse, Mississippi, in June 2022 arrest warrant for kidnapping which was issued for “Mrs. Roy Bryant” in 1955, but never served.
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Tyson said in a statement Thursday that Donham’s exact role in Till’s murder remains murky, but it’s clear she was involved.
“It’s comforted America to see this as just a story about monsters, including them,” Tyson said. “What keeps us from seeing this story is the monstrous social order that cared nothing for Emmett Till’s life, nor thousands more like him. . Neither the federal government nor the Mississippi government did anything to prevent this murder or to punish. Condemning what Donham did is easier than confronting what America was – and is.”
Weeks after the unserved arrest warrant was found, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch’s office said it was no new evidence to pursue a criminal case against Donham. In August, a prosecutor told a Leflore County grand jury refused to sue Donham.
Till’s cousin, Priscilla Sterling, filed a federal lawsuit on Feb. 7 against current Leflore County Sheriff Ricky Banks to force him to serve the 1955 warrant against Donham. In a response dated April 13, Banks’ attorney said yes no sense in serving the warrant on Donham because the grand jury didn’t indict her last year.
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Associated Press writer Allen G. Breed in Wake Forest, North Carolina, contributed to this report.
