The white woman Carolyn Bryant Donham, who claimed that Black teenager Emmett Till had made indecent advances before he was killed in Mississippi in 1955, died in hospice care in Louisiana, according to a coroner’s report.
Carolyn Bryant Donham was 88 years old. Donham passed away in Westlake, Louisiana, on Tuesday night, according to a death certificate delivered on Thursday to the Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office in Louisiana.
After Till’s mutilated body was discovered in a Mississippi river, his kidnapping and murder served as a catalyst for the civil rights movement when his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral in their hometown of Chicago. Jet magazine published the images. Till travelled to Mississippi in August 1955 from Chicago to visit family.
Donham accused him of making unwanted advances toward her while she was working at a grocery store in the little town of Money. Donham, who was 21 at the time, went by the name Carolyn Bryant.
The relative of Till claims When Till was 14 years old, he whistled at a woman, defying the racial social mores prevalent at the time in Mississippi, according to the Rev. Wheeler Parker, who was present.
There is proof that the woman who connected Roy Bryant, Donham’s ex-husband, and J.W. Milam, his half-brother, to Till’s murder did so. An all-white jury exonerated the two white men from the murder, but they later confessed in an interview with Look magazine. Donham said that she was unaware of Till’s future until The Associated Press obtained an unpublished memoir in 2022.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.”
