There is a very broad agreement that Carolyn Bryant Donham does not take an (open) secret to her grave. She takes the blame for inspiring one of the crimes that catalyzed the fight for civil rights in the United States.
It is clear that there were only two people who knew exactly what happened on August 24, 1955 in the grocery store in Money, a village in the state of Mississippi.
One was Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American resident of Chicago who had gone to spend a few days on vacation at his uncle’s house. The other was Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year-old white woman, who was behind the counter at the store, owned by her husband, Roy Bryant, and her stepbrother, J.W. milam.
In Money, an almost non-existent place today, they keep a plaque, next to that grocery store of which only remains of its walls were recently left, in which it is remembered that this Afro-American teenager died tortured for allegedly whistling at the white woman who attended the business and that he was behind the cash register.
Mamie Till, his mother, had the casket opened at the funeral in Chicago and allowed the press to take pictures. That image has perpetuated one of the most horrendous crimes of the 20th century and became one of the great denunciations against discrimination, white supremacism and the dehumanization of black citizens. Her story is part of popular culture, from a Bob Dylan song to a film released in 2022, Till, centered on the figure of her mother.
The clerk’s testimony during the trial allowed her husband and brother-in-law to be acquitted of the kidnapping (he slept at his family’s house) and murder of Emmett Till, whose body appeared a few days later in the river.
She assured the jury, made up of 12 white men, that “she put her hands on my waist, without provocation” and that the young man told her obscenities, which she did not want to repeat in public, from which she deduced her fear of being raped. .
Knowing that they could not be tried again for something already tried, the two brothers admitted to Life magazine in January 1956 that they were the authors. They charged for this confession.
At the age of 88, this ex-beauty queen died in a hospice in Westlake, a city in southern Louisiana, as reported this Thursday. The coroner’s office of this state issued a statement confirming her death without specifying her causes.
Her husband died in 1994, and Milam, in 1980. She was the last vestige of an event that encouraged and encouraged leaders such as the Reverend Martin Luther King. Emmett Till was before other famous names in the fight to end the Jim Crown laws that promoted racial segregation and gave carte blanche (never a more appropriate term) to lynching.
His disappearance means that the truth of what happened will never be made clear. Except if you forget that Bryant, more than half a century after that August day, admitted that he had perjured himself on the witness stand during his trial intervention.
He accepted that he made the teenager’s attitude seem much more threatening than it really was. He admitted that he acted as a “spokesman for a monstrous lie,” said historian Timothy B. Tyson, author of The Blood of Emmett Till. She published it in 2017. In two interviews conducted in 2008 for this work, Bryant acknowledged that it was all a fabrication to save her husband and her brother-in-law from prosecution. “She claimed that neither the physical assault nor anything threatening or sexual was true,†Tyson remarked.
But in some alleged unpublished memories that came out in 2021, the woman returned to the initial version. “He came into our store and put his hands on me. Do I think she should die for doing that? Absolutely, unequivocally not,†she wrote. The Till family, which has continued to demand that the error be corrected, countered that that allegation is riddled with inaccuracies. The Justice Department opened an investigation into Tyson’s work, but closed it in 2021 without charges for Bryant.
