According to a coroner’s report, the white woman 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 from 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 then known as Carolyn Bryant, accused him of making inappropriate approaches toward her in the small town of Money at a grocery shop. 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.
The teenager’s murderer J.W. Milam and Till’s half-brother Roy Bryant were both identified by a lady, according to the evidence. The two white men were cleared of the murder by an all-white jury, but they later confessed in an interview with Look magazine.
In a draft of her memoir that The Associated Press was able to get in 2022, Donham claimed she had no idea what would become of the 14-year-old Till. Donham had just turned 21.
The Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting was the first to publish on the information included in the 99-page manuscript titled “I am More Than A Wolf Whistle.” The AP received a copy from Durham historian and novelist Timothy Tyson, who claimed to have obtained it from Donham during their 2008 conversation.
Though he said he gave it to the FBI during an investigation the agency wrapped up last year, Tyson had deposited the document at an archive at the University of North Carolina with the understanding that it would not be made public for decades. He claimed that the recent discovery of a 1955 arrest warrant for Donham on kidnapping charges that was never executed led him to decide to make it public at this time.
This article published Original source: Associated Press writer Allen G. Breed in Wake Forest, North Carolina, contributed to this report.
