Carolyn Bryant Donham Dies at 88: Her Words Cause the Death of Emmett Till and sparked a new Civil Rights Movement

 

She said Till, 14, had accosted her, and her testimony in the 1955 trial of her husband and his half brother was crucial in their acquittal in one of the most momentous murders in American history.

Carolyn Bryant with her husband, Roy Bryant, and their children during his trial in 1955. Credit...Ed Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Shutterstock

Written by Margalit Fox

Story by New York TimesApril 27, 2023

Only two people knew exactly what happened during the minute they were alone together in the general store in Money, Miss., on Aug. 24, 1955. One, Emmett Till, a Black teenager visiting from Chicago, died four days later, at 14, in a brutal murder that stands out even in America’s long history of racial injustice.

The other was Carolyn Bryant. She was the 21-year-old white proprietress of the store where, according to her testimony in the September 1955 trial of her husband and his half brother for the murder, Till made a sexually suggestive remark to her, grabbed her roughly by the waist and let loose a wolf whistle.

Now Mrs. Bryant, more recently known as Carolyn Bryant Donham, has died at 88. On Thursday, Megan LeBoeuf, the chief investigator for the Calcasieu Parish coroner’s office in Louisiana, sent a statement confirming the death, on Tuesday, in Westlake, a small city in southern Louisiana. Ms. LeBoeuf did not provide further information.

With Mrs. Bryant’s death, the truth of what happened that August day may now never be clear. More than half a century after the murder, she admitted that she had perjured herself on the witness stand to make Till’s conduct sound more threatening than it actually was — serving, in the words of the historian to whom she made the admission, as “the mouthpiece of a monstrous lie.”

Read more: Carolyn Bryant Donham Dies at 88; Her Words Doomed Emmett Till - The New York Times (nytimes.com)