White woman whose accusations led to Emmett Till’s lynching dies

The white woman whose accusations led to the brutal torture and killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 Mississippi — a seminal moment in the Civil Rights era — has died. 

Carolyn Bryant Donham, who later acknowledged lying about the incident, was 88 years old when she died Thursday in Westlake, La. Donham was suffering from cancer and was receiving end-of-life hospice care.

In August 1955, Till, from Chicago, was visiting family in Mississippi when Donham alleged he propositioned her at her husband’s store. 

Donham’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother J.W. Milam then kidnapped, tortured and killed Till, a crime they later admitted to doing. Till was brutally beaten and then shot, before his body was dumped into the Tallahatchie River.

When his body was recovered, Till’s face was so badly disfigured he was nearly unrecognizable. But his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, refused to hold a closed casket funeral. Instead, she kept the casket open for thousands to see — and news photographs circled the nation. 

Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all-white jury for the murder, but they would later admit to the lynching.

Till’s murder was a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights movement, and it became one of the first visual representations of the brutalization Black Americans faced at the time. 

In 2007, Donham confessed she had lied about the incident with Till. Still, that same year after an FBI investigation, a majority-Black Mississippi grand jury declined to indict her.

Last year, another grand jury in Mississippi also declined to indict her on kidnapping and manslaughter charges, despite new information about an unserved arrest warrant and an unpublished memoir by Donham. 

Last year, President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law, making lynching a federal crime.

This year, nearly 70 years after Till was murdered, the House has passed a resolution to posthumously award both he and his mother the Congressional Gold Medal.