The white woman who accused black teenager Emmett Till of grabbing and whistling her just before he was kidnapped and killed in 1955 has died.
Carolyn Bryant Donham died Tuesday in Westlake, Louisiana, according to a report from the Calcasieu Township Coroner’s Office, available to USA TODAY. She was 88 years old.
The lynching of 14-year-old Till at Jim Crow South shocked the nation and fueled the civil rights movement. Donham was not charged with the crime.
Till, then 14, came from Chicago that summer to visit relatives in Mississippi. Donham, 21, accused him of making and embracing lewd comments while working at a family-owned grocery store in Mooney, Mississippi.
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A few days later, according to the US Department of Justice, Donham’s husband, his brother and one other person were kidnapped at least until the early hours of August 28. His body was found in the Tallahassee River three days later, laden with a cotton gin attached to the body with barbed wire.
State officials accused Roy Bryant, Donham’s husband, and J. Milam was charged with murder, and Dunham testified at the trial. The men were acquitted by an all-white jury. Months later, Look magazine ran a report on the murder of the two men, who confessed to hitting Till and throwing him into a river.
Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, peered into an open coffin in Chicago to let the public see what had happened to her son and allowed the black press to photograph his body. Tens of thousands of people paid their last respects and the murder drew international attention.
In an unpublished memoir, Donham said the men brought Till to her for identification and that she didn’t know what would happen to him, according to the Associated Press, which obtained the 99-page manuscript in 2022 after it was reported from the Mississippi Center.
