#Socialites, get into this: Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman whose accusation set off the horrific lynching of Emmett Till nearly 70 years ago, has died. The 88-year-old was suffering from cancer and was receiving end-of-life hospice care.
As many are familiar, in August 1955, Emmett Till had barely turned 14 when he visited his Mississippi relatives from Chicago, only to be brutally beaten and shot to death after he reportedly wolf-whistled at Donham at a local store. His death rocked the black community and the world as his mother, Mamie, decided to leave the casket open to let everyone “see what they did to my boy.” Over 50,000 attended the funeral, and the unsettling photograph appeared in major publications around the world.
While Till’s family had to live without him, Donham and her family were able to live a pretty normal life as an all-white jury acquitted Donham’s then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother J.W. Milam. However, the guys later confessed to Look Magazine that they had indeed beaten and killed Till.
Before her passing, Till’s family had continued to call on authorities to arrest Donham.
In 2022, a team searching the basement of a Mississippi courthouse for evidence about the lynching of the Black teenager actually found the unserved warrant charging a White woman in his 1955 kidnapping!
Despite the findings, in August a grand jury in Mississippi declined to indict the White woman. After hearing more than seven hours of testimony from investigators and witnesses, a Leflore County grand determined there was insufficient evidence to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham on charges of kidnapping and manslaughter.
Till’s cousin, Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr., said at the time that the decision is as “unfortunate but predictable” in a statement to CBS News.
Despite the unfortunate outcome, in March of that year, President Joe Biden signed a bill named after Emmett Till making lynching a hate crime.
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“Over the years, several federal hate crime laws were enacted, including one I signed last year to combat COVID-19 hate crimes. But no federal law — no federal law expressly prohibited lynching. None. Until today.” He said at the time.
The fairly new law makes it possible to prosecute a crime as a lynching when a conspiracy to commit a hate crime leads to death or serious bodily injury, according to Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill, who champion the bill. The law lays out a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison and fines.
Speaking on Donham’s passing, Devery Anderson, the author of “Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement,” said Donham’s death marks an unfortunate end of a chapter.
Some people “have been clinging to hope that she could be prosecuted. She was the last remaining person who had any involvement,” he said. “Now that can’t happen.” For many, “it’s going to be a wound because justice was never done,” he said. “Some others were clinging to hope she might still talk or tell the truth. … Now it’s over.”