Carolyn Bryant Donham was never held legally responsible for her alleged role in the horrific kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, and, at 88, has reportedly lived out her final years in relative tranquility in Kentucky.
In her unpublished memoir, however, Donham said she “always felt like a victim as well as Emmett” and “paid dearly with an altered life” for what happened to him.
The acclaimed new film, “Till,” makes the case for why Donham deserves no sympathy and instead should have been prosecuted for the lynching, one of the most brutal moments in America’s history of racial segregation. Donham set the tragic events in motion after she accused the boy from Chicago of making improper advances to her when he stepped into her rural grocery store on Aug. 24, 1955, to buy bubble gum.
