Woman whose accusation led to Emmett Till lynching dies

Carolyn Bryant Donham falsely claimed the 14-year-old boy had propositioned her and touched her on the arm, hand and waist.

Jesse Jackson said Emmett Till’s lynching was the ‘big bang’ of the civil rights movement. Picture: AFP

The white woman who accused Emmett Till of flirting with her in 1955, leading to the lynching of the black teenager that helped inspire the sweeping US civil rights movement, has died. She was 88.

Carolyn Bryant Donham died Tuesday at her home in Louisiana.

Till, 14, was visiting relatives in rural Mississippi in 1955 when he was kidnapped, beaten and shot dead by racist vigilantes after being accused of chatting up Donham at a grocery store. He and some other local children had visited the store where Donham, then 21, was working alone.

She said at the time he had propositioned her and touched her on the arm, hand and waist. His disfigured body was found a few days later in a river. His mother Mamie had his body displayed at the funeral in an open casket. Activist Jesse Jackson would later call Till’s killing the “big bang” of the civil rights movement.

Donham’s husband Roy Bryant, whose family owned the store, and his half-brother J.W. Milam were arrested and acquitted on murder charges by an all-white jury. Donham was never taken into custody.

The men later admitted in a magazine interview that they had killed the boy. Last year, Donham claimed in an unpublished memoir she was unaware that Till would be tortured and murdered. In her account, she said the men brought the boy to her in the middle of the night and she denied it was him, but that he himself admitted it. In 2017, the author of a book on the case said Donham confessed that Till had never made any advances. The Justice Department opened the file for a second time, but investigators failed to determine whether she had invented the incident or not, and the investigation was closed again in 2021. A Mississippi grand jury last year declined to indict her.

After decades of activism on the subject, a new law named after Till came into effect in 2022 making racist lynchings a federal crime with a punishment of up to 30 years in prison.

Twitter lit up with comments on the death of Donham, with many people expressing outrage that while Till was lynched as a boy, she lived into old age.

“She got to live a long life. #EmmettTill did not – because of her lies,” said a post from a US actor and comedian Yvette Nicole Brown. “May her soul eternally reside in the place her duplicity and hatred earned for her.”

AFP