According to a coroner’s report, the white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham who claimed that Black teenager Emmett Till had made inappropriate approaches before he was killed in Mississippi in 1955 passed away in hospice care in Louisiana.
At age 88, Carolyn Bryant Donham. According to a death record submitted on Thursday to the Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office in Louisiana, Donham passed away on Tuesday evening in Westlake, Louisiana.
When Till’s mother insisted on an open-casket funeral in their Chicago city after his mutilated body was found in a river in Mississippi, his kidnapping and murder served as a trigger for the civil rights movement. Photos were published by Jet magazine.
In August 1955, Till made a trip from Chicago to see family in Mississippi. Donham, who was 21 at the time and went by the name Carolyn Bryant, accused him of making inappropriate approaches toward her while she was working at a grocery shop in the tiny town of Money.
According to Till’s cousin The Rev. Wheeler Parker, who was present, Till whistled at the woman when he was 14 years old, defying the racial social mores of the time in Mississippi.
Evidence shows that the woman who linked Till’s murder to Donham’s then-husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam. The two white men were cleared of the murder by an all-white jury, but they later confessed in an interview with Look magazine.
Donham said that she was uninformed of what would transpire about Till in an unpublished memoir that The Associated Press was able to get in 2022.
The contents of the 99-page manuscript, titled “I am More Than A Wolf Whistle,” were first reported by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. Historian and author Timothy Tyson of Durham, North Carolina, who said he obtained a copy from Donham while interviewing her in 2008, provided a copy to the AP.
Tyson said in a statement Thursday that Donham’s precise role in the killing of Till remains murky, but it’s clear she was involved.
“It has comforted America to see this as merely a story of monsters, her among them,” Tyson said. “What this narrative keeps us from seeing is the monstrous social order that cared nothing for the life of Emmett Till nor thousands more like him. Neither the federal government nor the government of Mississippi did anything to prevent or punish this murder. Condemning what Donham did is easier than confronting what America was — and is.”
