Emmett Till accuser Carolyn Bryant Donham dies aged 88 – one year after Mississippi grand jury declined to indict her over his kidnap and brutal death 68 years ago
- Carolyn Bryant Donham died in Louisiana after a quiet battle with cancer
- In 1955, her claim that Till wolf-whistled at her led to the 14-year-old’s lynching
Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman whose accusation against Emmett Till led to his lynching, has died at the age of 88 without ever facing persecution.
Donham accused Till of wolf-whistling at her in 1955 in Mississippi when he was 14 and she was 21.
The allegation – which has never been proven nor disproven – triggered her husband and brother-in-law to kidnap Till, beat him senselessly and savagely, and lynch him.
His death, and his mother’s insistence that his brutalized remains be shown in an open casket, remains a defining image of the deep racism that penetrated America’s South in the 1950s.
Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman whose accusation against Emmett Till led to his lynching, has died at the age of 88 in Mississippi. She is shown in photos obtained by DailyMail.com in one of her final sightings
Donham (left) was 21 and then known as Carolyn Bryant, when she accused 14-year-old Emmett Till (right) of whistling at her and making verbal and physical advances during an encounter at her family store in Money, Mississippi on August 24, 1955. Her allegations prompted her then-husband and brother-in-law to abduct and kill Till in one of the most barbaric lynchings in US history
In recent years, Donham was living quietly in Louisiana.
DailyMail.com tracked her down to her home last year.
She declined to speak, as did her son.
Donham was receiving hospice care for an unknown cancer, according to the Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office today.
Her death comes after years of desperate attempts by Till’s relatives to bring her to justice.
Emmett Till with his mother, Mamie Bradley in 1950. Till, who was from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Mississippi during the summer of 1955 when he was brutally murdered
Donham, pictured with her two sons, Roy Jr and Thomas, and then-husband Roy Bryant in September 1955, had claimed Till, a whistled at her. In return, Bryant and his brother abducted him from his great-uncle’s home four days later and killed him
While her husband was charged and acquitted over Till’s death, she was never arrested.
A grand jury was impaneled to weigh charges against her last year 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 memoir that she never told her husband or his brother to hurt Till, an that she never identified him.
Till’s relatives are yet to respond to the news of her death.
Emmett’s mother Mamie, who insisted on having an open casket funeral to expose the atrocities committed on her son, became an activist and spoke of her son as the ‘sacrificial lamb’ of the Civil Rights movement for which contributions soared in the aftermath of his death. She died in 2003 at the age of 81
Bradley insisted on having an open coffin funeral to show her son’s tortured and mutilated body and expose the horror of his lynching and the persecution of African Americans in the US during the Jim Crow era
