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Carolyn Bryant Donham, the White woman whose accusation led to the 1955 torcher and lynching of a teenager named Emmett Till in Mississippi, has died at the age of 88 allegedly from cancer.
14 year old Emmett Till from Chicago was visiting family in Mississippi when he was abducted, tortured, and lynched, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family’s grocery store. Emmett Till’s mother Mamie Till had insisted on an open-casket funeral to show the vicious way her child was murdered. Images of Till’s body was printed in The Chicago Defender and Jet magazine, and directed attention to the lack of rights of black people in the South. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States.
Carolyn Bryant Donham died Tuesday night in Westlake, Louisiana, according to a death report filed Thursday in Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office in Louisiana.
In a statement by Malik Shabazz, with Black Lawyers for Justice:
“Carolyn Bryant’s death brings a conclusion to a painful chapter for the Emmett Till family and for Black peoples in America. The tragic part about Bryant’s death was that she was never held accountable for her role in the death of young Emmett Till, who is the martyr for the Civil Rights Movement,”
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Source: Radio One Digital
