THE WHITE WOMAN who accused Emmett Till of flirting with her in 1955, leading to the stunning lynching of the Black teenager that helped inspire the sweeping US civil rights movement, has died, officials have said.
Carolyn Bryant Donham died on Tuesday at her home in Louisiana, a letter from the local coroner’s office sent to AFP said.
It did not give a reason for the 88-year-old’s death.
Till, 14, was visiting relatives in rural Mississippi in the summer of 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.
The decision by his mother Mamie to have the body displayed at the funeral in an open casket brought home the horrors of lynchings and discrimination in the South.
Minister and activist Jesse Jackson would later call Till’s killing the “big bang” of the civil rights movement.
An exhibit dedicated to Till at the Smithsonian’s popular National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington is often marked by long queues of visitors.
Donham’s husband Roy Bryant, whose family owned the grocery 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Last year, US media reported that an unpublished memoir written by Donham claimed she was unaware that Till would be tortured and murdered.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 2004, the Justice Department had reopened the investigation, but was unable to press any charges due to the statute of limitations.
In 2017, the author of a book on the case said Donham confessed that Till had never made any advances. The Justice Department reopened the file again, but investigators failed to determine whether she had invented the incident or not, and the investigation was closed again in December 2021.
A grand jury in Mississippi declined to indict Donham last year.
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.
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