Woman behind Emmett Till lynching admits lying
1955 falsehood helped acquit killers in case that galvanized U.S civil-rights movement
For six decades, she has been the silent woman linked to one of the most notorious crimes in U.S. history, the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, keeping her thoughts and memories to herself as millions of strangers idealized or vilified her.
But all these years later, a historian says the woman has broken her silence, and acknowledged that the most incendiary parts of the story she and others told about Emmett — claims that seem tame today but were more than enough to get a black person killed in Jim Crow-era Mississippi — were false.
The woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, spoke to Timothy B. Tyson, a Duke University professor — possibly the only interview she has given to a historian or journalist since shortly after the episode — who has written a book, The Blood of Emmett Till, to be published next week.
In it, he writes that Donham now recants her long-ago allegations that Emmett grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her. “That part is not true,” she told him.
The revelations were first reported Friday by Vanity Fair. As a matter of narrow justice, it makes little difference. True or not, her claims did not justify any serious penalty, much less death. The two white men who were accused of murdering Emmett in 1955 — and later admitted it in a Look magazine interview — were acquitted that year by an all-white, all-male jury and so could not be retried.
They and others suspected of involvement in the killing died long ago.
But among thousands of lynchings of black people, this one looms large in the country’s tortured racial history, taught in history classes to schoolchildren and often cited as one of the catalysts for the civil-rights movement.
Photographs in Jet magazine of Emmett’s gruesomely mutilated body — at a funeral that his mother insisted have an open coffin, to show the world what his killers had done — had a galvanizing effect on black America.
The case has refused to fade, revived in a long list of writings and works of art, including, recently, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, a book that unearths the case of Emmett’s father, a soldier who was executed by the army on charges of murder and rape.
The U.S. Justice Department began an investigation into the Emmett Till lynching in 2004. Emmett’s body was exhumed for an autopsy and the FBI rediscovered the long-missing trial transcript. But in 2007, a grand jury decided not to indict Donham, or anyone else, as an accomplice in the murder.
“I was hoping that one day she would admit it, so it matters to me that she did and it gives me some satisfaction,” said Wheeler Parker, 77, a cousin of Emmett’s who lives near Chicago.
Emmett, who lived in Chicago, was visiting relatives in Money, a tiny hamlet in the Mississippi Delta region when, on Aug. 24, 1955, he went into a store owned by married couple Roy and Carolyn Bryant. Carolyn was then 21.
Four days later, he was kidnapped from his uncle’s house, beaten and tortured beyond recognition and shot in the head. His body was tied with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan and thrown into the Tallahatchie River.
Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were arrested and charged with murder.
What happened in that store is unclear, but it has usually been portrayed as an example of a black boy from up North unwittingly defying the strict racial mores of the South at the time.
Days after the arrest, Bryant told her husband’s lawyer that Emmett had insulted her, but said nothing about physical contact, Tyson said. Five decades later, she told the FBI that he had touched her hand.
But at the trial, she testified — without the jury present — that Emmett had grabbed her and, using vulgar language, told her that he had been with white women before.
“She said that wasn’t true, but that she honestly doesn’t remember exactly what did happen,” Tyson said in an interview Friday. Donham, now 82, could not be reached for comment.
Donham told Tyson that soon after the killing, her husband’s family hid her away, moving her from place to place for days, to keep her from talking to law enforcement.
She has said that Roy Bryant, whom she later divorced, was physically abusive to her.
“The circumstances under which she told the story were coercive,” Tyson said. “She’s horrified by it. There’s clearly a great burden of guilt and sorrow.”