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.”
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.
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.
READ MORE:
- Emmett Till’s family calls for woman’s arrest after discovery of unserved warrant from 1955
- Civil rights lawsuit filed after woman with dementia suffers dislocated shoulder and broken arm during arrest
While Donham’s death may bring some closure, she was never held accountable for what she did to Emmett Till.
