Lori Falce: Emmett Till accuser has died, but her legacy should live on as a cautionary tale

Apr. 28—Carolyn Bryant Donham died on Tuesday at 88.

It was possible for Donham to live a simple, respectful and respectable life in the Mississippi Delta area where she was born. She could have gone about her world with no one ever knowing her name.

Instead, her name will forever be linked to one of the most vile and hateful crimes in American history. In 1955, she told her husband a 14-year-old boy whistled at her. Emmett Till, a Black kid from Chicago visiting his mother's family for the summer, paid for that with his life.

Her husband, Roy Bryant, and friends abducted Till. They beat him to an unrecognizable pulp. They shot him. They tied a 70-pound metal cotton gin fan around his throat with barbed wire. They threw him into the Tallahatchie River like the garbage they believed he was. And, in the Jim Crow South, the surprising part was not that they got away with it but that they saw a courtroom at all.

Donham was seen by those men who brutalized Till as the victim in the story. She testified in court to the boy — someone who would be in middle school today — having grasped her hand and asking for a date. Writer and historian Timothy Tyson claimed in 2017 that, in an interview with Donham, she admitted to making up portions of her account and said Till didn't deserve to be murdered.

Bryant admitted to the crime in an interview with Look magazine, for which he made thousands of dollars. Donham divorced him in 1979. She said he was physically abusive. For some, that could make her more sympathetic. For others, it could make her a coward who valued herself above a child because of his skin color.

There have been calls over the years for Donham to face justice for being the catalyst in Till's death, a killing so horrific that it is rightly pointed to as a galvanizing moment in the civil rights movement. There was even a 70-year-old warrant for her arrest discovered in 2022. Instead, she receded into history.

She shouldn't get to stay there.

Till deserved to see the Kennedy election and the moon landing, to grumble about computers and how no one made cars like they used to. He should have buried his mother when she died in 2003 instead of having her make the heartbreaking and earth-shaking decision to have his open-casket funeral photographed so people would know what happened to him.

Donham's legacy should be a cautionary tale at a time when one is sorely needed. We regularly see evidence of those cut from the same cloth, who choose to make accusations and start confrontations because they believe they are entitled to judge someone else's worth by their color or language.

Donham is the proof that there is nothing more dangerous than the casual dismissal of someone else's life.

Lori Falce is a Tribune-Review community engagement editor. You can contact Lori at lfalce@triblive.com.