Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white lady who accused black teenager Emmett Till of inappropriate sexual advances, culminating to his lynching, died at the age of 88.
According to a death record issued Thursday, April 27, in the Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office in Louisiana, Donham died Tuesday night, April 25, in hospice care in Westlake, Louisiana.
When his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral in their hometown of Chicago after his brutalized body was rescued from a Mississippi river, Till’s kidnapping and slaying became a trigger for the civil rights movement.
In August 1955, Till traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to visit relatives. Donham, then Carolyn Bryant, accused him of making inappropriate advances on her at a grocery store in Money.
According to Rev. Wheeler Parker, a relative of Till who was present, 14-year-old Till whistled at the woman.
Evidence suggests that a lady linked Emmett Till to Carolyn’s then-husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, who murdered the teen.
The two white men were acquitted of the homicide by an all-white jury, but they later confessed in an interview with Look magazine.
In an unpublished memoir obtained by The Associated Press in 2022, Donham said she was unaware of what would happen to the 14-year-old Till. Donham was 21 at the time.