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In her unpublished memoir, however, Donham said she “always felt like a victim as well as Emmett” and “paid dearly with an altered life” for what happened to him.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.
Today, Donham lives in a small apartment community in Kentucky, with her son and a small dog, the Daily Mail reported. The Daily Mail, which published photos of her over the weekend, reported Donham suffers from cancer, is legally blind and is receiving end-of-life hospice care.
“She has good days and bad,” the Daily Mail said. She and her son declined to be interviewed when a reporter contacted them at home.
This weekend’s release of “Till,” which co-stars Danielle Deadwyler and Whoopi Goldberg as Till’s mother and grandmother, comes two months after a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Donham on charges of kidnapping and manslaughter. The jurors heard differing accounts from Donham and others about Till’s interactions with her at the grocery store and to what extent she was complicit in how her then-husband, Roy Bryant, and others chose to retaliate. In the view of these white men, Till had violated an unwritten racist code in the Jim Crow South about how Black men were supposed to behave around white women.
“Till” shows that the teenager, raised in the North and not familiar with that code, did nothing more than pay Donham a compliment. In the film, Till, played with youthful innocence and exuberance by Jalyn Hall, tells the 21-year-old mother of two that she looks like a movie star. After he leaves the store, he whistles at her.
In the early morning hours of Aug. 28, 1955, Roy Bryant, his half-brother, J.W. Milam, and at least one other person burst into Emmett’s relatives’ home, looking for the “boy that done the talking,” to Bryant’s wife, according to an FBI memo.
The armed men left with Till after a person in a waiting car with a “lighter voice than a man’s” identified him as that boy, the memo said. The movie portrays that the person in the car was Donham.
Three days later, Till’s body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River. In an interview they later gave to Look magazine, Bryant and Milam confessed to beating Till and shooting him in the head. To dispose of the body, they fastened a 75-pound metal fan, used for ginning cotton, to his neck with barbed wire, and then pushed his body into the river.
In a landmark moment in Civil Rights history, Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till, decided to hold an open casket funeral. She allowed a photographer to publish images of his brutally beaten body on the cover of Jet magazine and invited thousands of Chicagoans to see what happened to her son as they came to the church to pay their respects.
Two weeks after Till’s burial, the trial opened for Bryant and Milam. As part of an evidentiary procedure, Donham testified, though not in front of the jury made up of 12 White men.
Given “Till’s” earlier depiction of the teenager’s interaction with Donham, the movie strongly suggests she lied on the stand when she testified that he “caught” her hand with “a strong grip” when he reached out to pay for his gum. Donham also claimed he asked, “How about a date, baby?”
After Donham said she “jerked” her hand away, she said he came toward her at the cash register, and put “both hands on her waist” asking, “What’s the matter, baby,” according to the FBI memo. As Donham said she tried to free herself, she said the teenager told her that she “needn’t be afraid of” him because he had been “with white women before.”
Donham said Till only stopped when another person came into the store and pulled him out, the FBI memo said. She said she ran out the door to get her pistol from a car. That’s when she heard Till whistle at her. She claimed that the interaction with Till “scared (her) to death.”
The case drew international outrage when the all-white jury delivered a not-so-surprising verdict after deliberating for only 67 minutes, PBS reported. The jury voted to acquit Bryant and Milam. The two men celebrated by posing for photographers, lighting up cigars and kissing their wives. In an interview with Look magazine, Milan justified killing Till by saying, “(W)hen a (n-word) gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin. I’m likely to kill him,” the FBI memo said.
Milam died in 1980, and Bryant died in 1994, and the world mostly lost track of Donham, according to the Daily Mail. In 2004, the year after Mamie Till died, the FBI reopened the murder as a federal civil rights investigation to find out if any others could be prosecuted, the FBI memo said. However the U.S. Justice Department determined there was no basis for a federal prosecution at that time. Based on evidence provided by the FBI, including an interview with Donham, a Mississippi grand jury in 2007 also declined to prosecute her or others
Public interest in Donham — and particularly her testimony — was sparked again in 2017, when author and historian Timothy Tyson was promoting his new book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” the FBI memo said. He told several media outlets that he had twice interviewed Donham in 2008 and she had recanted her trial testimony about Till physically accosting her.
Tyson said she handed him a transcript of her sworn testimony and claimed, “That part’s not true.” She said she “honestly” didn’t remember what happened decades earlier, Tyson wrote. “You tell these stories for so long that they seem true, but that part is not true,” Tyson said Donham said. “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”
The FBI launched a new investigation in 2018 into whether Donham lied on the stand, as Tyson suggested. The agency agreed there’s “considerable doubt” about the credibility of Donham’s testimony, however, agents hit a roadblock in proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Donham committed perjury, the FBI memo said.
Tyson didn’t record the portion of his interview when he said she recanted her testimony, and gave inconsistent explanations about why no recording existed, the memo said. His notes about when Donham supposedly recanted her testimony also were sparse and don’t directly point to this conclusion.
In Donham’s unpublished memoir, “I am More Than A Wolf Whistle,” obtained by the Associated Press this summer, she insisted that she didn’t know what would happen to Till after her husband and brother-in-law kidnapped him. She said she tried to help him after they brought him to her in the middle of the night for identification.
“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 said in the manuscript, which she gave to Tyson, the AP reported.
“I tried to protect him by telling Roy that ‘He’s not the one. That’s not him. Please take him home,'” she said. Donham claimed Till spoke up and identified himself.
The AP published the memoir after Till’s family and filmmaker Keith Beauchamp unearthed an unserved arrest warrant for Donham, along with her late husband and his half-brother, CNN reported. A note on the back of the warrant, dated August 29, 1955, said she was not arrested at the time because she could not be located.
Prompted by the warrant, a grand jury again was convened to hear evidence from the case in 2004 but declined to indict Donham, citing insufficient evidence, the district attorney for Leflore County said in a statement. “The murder of Emmett Till remains an unforgettable tragedy in this country and the thoughts and prayers of this nation continue to be with the family of Emmett Till,” District Attorney Dewayne Richardson wrote.
