Who was Carolyn Bryant Donham?
Carolyn Bryant Donham was a white woman who accused black teen Emmett Till of wolf-whistling at her and making advances in 1955 in Mississippi when she was 21, causing one of the most famous lynchings in history.
Donham was born in 1934. She died in hospice care on April 25, 2023 in Westlake, Louisiana, according to a death report in the Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office.
In the years before she died, Donham was living quietly in Louisiana.
She was receiving hospice care for an unknown cancer, according to the Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office.
Her death came after decades of attempts by Till’s relatives to bring her to justice.
While Donham’s husband was charged and acquitted over Till’s death, she was never arrested.
At Till’s funeral, his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open coffin so the world could see what had been done to him.
This helped to ignite the Civil Rights movement, drawing national attention to the atrocities and violence that African Americans faced in the US.
A study by the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative found that there were 4,075 racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950. It noted that 654 of these took place in Mississippi.
Pictured: Donham in one of her final sightings before she died on April 25, 2023 in Westlake, Louisiana
What was her role in Emmett Till’s lynching?
In August 1955, Till had traveled from Chicago to see relatives in Mississippi.
Donham, who was named Carolyn Bryant at the time, accused him of making improper advances at a grocery store where she was working in the small community of Money.
The Reverand Wheeler Parker, a cousin of Till who was there, has said Till whistled at the woman.
During a trial, Donham claimed Till, who was 14 at the time, grabbed her and threatened her physically.
The allegation has never been proven nor disproven.
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Evidence indicates that a woman identified Till to Donham’s then-husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, who killed the teenager.
They kidnapped the boy at gunpoint in the middle of the night, tortured him and tossed his body into a river, four days after Donham made the accusations.
During the trial against the two men, Donham took the stand and testified that Till had grabbed her hand and propositioned her.
Pictured: Emmett Till with his mother, Mamie Bradley, in 1950. She insisted on having an open casket funeral to expose the atrocities committed on her son
An all-white jury acquitted the two white men in the killing, but the men later confessed in an interview with Look magazine.
Neither was ever been brought to justice and both are now dead.
Prosecutors sought charges against Donham for the killing of Till up until the year before her death.
A grand jury was impaneled to weigh charges against Donham in 2022 but jurors declined to indict her.
Around the same time, an unpublished memoir written by Donham, in which she called herself a ‘victim,’ was made public.
She claimed in the memoir that she never told her husband or his brother to hurt Till, and that she had never identified him.
Donham was never taken into custody over the events that resulted in the lynching.
For decades, Till’s relatives fought to bring Donham to justice.
In February 2023, Till’s cousin, Patricia Sterling, filed a federal lawsuit against Ricky Banks, the sheriff in Leflore county, Mississippi, asking him to serve a 1955 arrest warrant against Carolyn Bryant Donham, who was then identified as ‘Mrs Roy Bryant’ in the document.
A team searching for evidence surrounding Till’s death found the arrest warrant in 2022 in a Mississippi courthouse basement.
