The white woman whose claims against Emmett Till led to his lynching nearly 70 years ago, has died at the age of 88.
Carolyn Bryant Donham had been battling cancer and was in hospice care.
Donham had been accused of setting off the 1955 lynching of Black teen, Emmett Till by claiming that the 14-year-old wolf-whistled at her while she was working as a clerk at a grocery store.
Years later she admitted lying at the boy's murder trial.
Her death comes after a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict her in August last year over the death.
Last year, Till’s family demanded she is brought to justice after an old arrest warrant was discovered.
Campaigners found an unserved document for Donham who accused the Black teen of making advances toward her in Money, Mississippi.
The allegation, made in 1955, led to Till being kidnapped from his home, brutally tortured, killed and thrown in a river.
Donham was married to one of two white men tried, and acquitted, weeks after Till was abducted.
The young boy, who was from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he entered a shop where Donham, then 21, was working on August 24, 1955.
She set off the case by accusing the teenager of making improper advances at a family store in Money, Mississippi.
A cousin of Till who was there has said he whistled at the woman, which flew in the face of Mississippi's racist social codes of the era.
Evidence indicates a woman identified Till to the men who later killed him.
Her husband Roy Bryan and J W Milam were acquitted of the murder soon after by an all-White jury, though they later admitted to the killing in an interview with Look magazine. Milam died in 1980, and Bryant died in 1994.
Till’s kidnapping and killing became a catalyst for the civil rights movement when his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral in their hometown of Chicago after his brutalized body was pulled from a river in Mississippi. Jet magazine published photos.
Devery Anderson, the author of “Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement,” commented on Donham’s death saying it marks the end of a chapter.
The author said that some people "have been clinging to hope that she could be prosecuted. She was the last remaining person who had any involvement. Now that can’t happen."
He added, according to Mississippi Today, that for many, "it’s going to be a wound, because justice was never done. Some others were clinging to hope she might still talk or tell the truth. … Now it’s over."
According to the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, Carolyn lied during Emmett Till's murder trial. She had initially told her husband’s defence lawyer that Till grabbed her hand, asked for a date and whistled at her.
But during the trial, she testified that Till grabbed her around the waist, propositioned her and claimed he had had sex with White women before.
In his book 'The Blood of Emmett Till', Professor Timothy Tyson, who interviewed Carolyn Bryant Donham, quoted her admitting she lied in court.
"In her memoir, she recounts the story she told at the trial using imagery from the class Southern racist horror movie of the ‘Black Beast’ rapist.
"But about her testimony that Till had grabbed her around the waist and uttered obscenities, she now told me, ‘That part’s not true.’"
He also quoted Donham as saying, "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him."
Tyson said in a statement Thursday that Donham's precise role in the killing of Till remains murky, but it's clear she was involved.
“It has comforted America to see this as merely a story of monsters, her among them," Tyson said.
"What this narrative keeps us from seeing is the monstrous social order that cared nothing for the life of Emmett Till nor thousands more like him.
"Neither the federal government nor the government of Mississippi did anything to prevent or punish this murder. Condemning what Donham did is easier than confronting what America was — and is.”
