Explore More

Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman at the center of the Emmett Till lynching nearly 70 years ago, has died.

Donham died Tuesday afternoon in Westlake, Louisiana, according to the Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office.

She was 88.  

Donham had been battling cancer and was in hospice care, Mississippi Today reported.

Donham was accused of setting off the lynching of the black 14-year-old in the small Mississippi town of Money back in 1955.

The then-21-year-old had alleged Till wolf-whistled at her while she was working in her family’s grocery store – an act that flew in the face of the state’s racist social codes.

Donham’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother J.W. Milam, kidnapped Till at gunpoint before shooting him and throwing his body in the Tallahatchie River.

His brutalized body, which had been weighed down by a cotton-gin fan, was pulled from the river days later.

Till’s slaying became a catalyst for the civil rights movement when his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral. 

Jet magazine published photos of the boy’s mutilated body inside the casket.

Bryant and Milam were acquitted of slaying by an all-white jury in 1955, but later admitted to the killing in an article in Look Magazine.

Donham, however, was never arrested or charged in Till’s lynching.

Her death comes after a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict her in August last year over Till’s murder.

The decision to not indict came after an unserved arrest warrant charging her with Till’s abduction was discovered in the basement of the Leflore County courthouse in June 2022. 

At the time, the Leflore County district attorney said the grand jury had reviewed evidence and testimony before they declined to indict Donham on charges of kidnapping and manslaughter.

Meanwhile, in her unpublished memoir that emerged last year, Donham denied that she ever identified Till to his killers, or that she wanted him dead.

“I did not wish Emmett any harm and could not stop harm from coming to him, since I didn’t know what was planned for him,” Donham was quoted as saying in the manuscript obtained by the Associated Press.

“I tried to protect him by telling Roy that ‘He’s not the one. That’s not him. Please take him home.’”

ncG1vNJzZmimqaW8tMCNnKamZ2Jlf3R7j21ma29fmK6zu8uypWaaoq6ur8CMnaanoJGieri7zJqlZpmkYrCmutOeqWanlmKyrrnEratmrJmhuW63yKWjoqaXYrGqsdJo