Carolyn Bryant Donham, woman whose accusation led to Emmett Till's lynching, has died

Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman whose accusation led to the 1955 lynching of the Black teenager Emmett Till, has died.

According to a coroner’s report she died in a hospice facility Tuesday night in Westlake, Louisiana at the age of 88. She had been suffering from cancer at the time of her death.

Malik Shabazz, of Black Lawyers for Justice, released a statement saying, “Carolyn Bryant’s death brings a conclusion to a painful chapter for the Emmett Till family and for Black peoples in America. The tragic part about Bryant’s death was that she was never held accountable for her role in the death of young Emmett Till, who is the martyr for the Civil Rights Movement.”

Death is not justice.

An arrest warrant was issued for Carolyn Bryant Donham in August 1955 related to the murder of Emmett Till. But it was never served. Instead, she was able to live a full life to 88 years old.

Emmett Till only lived to 14 years old. This is not justice. pic.twitter.com/nwYAdGHqzv
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) April 27, 2023

In August 1955, Till had barely turned 14 when he visited relatives in Mississippi from Illinois.

Donham, who was Carolyn Bryant at the time, accused the teenager of making advances at her in a local grocery store. Rev. Wheeler Parker, Till’s cousin, was there and said the teen whistled at the 21-year-old woman.

She later told her husband, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, about the incident and the two men kidnapped Till and brutally beat him before shooting the teen in the head and dumping his body into the Tallahatchie River.

Bryant and Milam were acquitted of murder by an all white jury. During the trial Donham testified that Till grabbed her and threatened her.

Both men later admitted to killing the teenager in a 1956 interview.

Over the years there had been several attempts made to charge Donham, but each, including the most recent in 2022, failed.

Portrait of Emmet Louis Till. Till was a 14 year old African American boy from Chicago who was murdered by white men in Leflore County in Mississippi because he allegedly whistled at a white woman.

Till’s kidnapping and violent death fueled the civil rights movement when his mother chose to leave her son’s casket open “let the world see what they did to my boy.”

More than 50,000 people attended Till’s Chicago funeral, and countless more saw his brutalized body after Jet and other publications published photos of his body.

While Donham’s death may bring some closure, she was never held accountable for what she did to Emmett Till.