Woman at the Center of Emmett Till Case Reveals She Lied

In an exclusive interview with Vanity Fair, author Timothy Tyson reveals that he tracked down the woman whose accusation led to the murder of then 14-year-old Emmett Till and catalyzed the 20th-century civil rights movement.

In 1955, Carolyn Bryant accused Till of whistling at her while in the general store buying candy. Bryant told her husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, who then decided to take the law into their own hands by torturing, dismembering and murdering the young boy. The incident left Till’s body so hideously disfigured from having been bludgeoned and shot that its horrifying depiction—in a photo in Jet magazine—would help to propel the American civil rights movement.

 

After taking the stand more than 60 years ago, with the claim that Till had grabbed her and verbally threatened her, stating that, “he said [he had] —done something – with white women before,” adding the incident left her “just scared to death,” led to the acquittal of the two men by the all-white, all-male jury in little over an hour; Bryant confessed that she made the whole thing up.

In a new book, The Blood of Emmett Till (Simon & Schuster), Timothy Tyson, a Duke University senior research scholar, reveals that Carolyn—in 2007, at age 72—confessed that she had fabricated the most sensational part of her testimony. “That part’s not true,” she told Tyson, about her claim that Till had made verbal and physical advances on her. As for the rest of what happened that evening in the country store, she said she couldn’t remember.

Vanity Fair notes that the now-82-year-old, Carolyn Donham (she’s since been married and divorced three times) who’s whereabouts have been kept a secret by her family, was the one who approached Tyson because she was writing her memoirs. Her daughter had reportedly admired Tyson’s earlier book Blood Done Sign My Name, which is centered on another racially charged murder committed by someone known to Tyson’s family.

Tyson’s book is due to be published next week by Simon & Schuster. And, according to Vanity Fair, although several other authors have written about Emmett’s story, no one, with the exception of Tyson, has ever had the opportunity to interview Donham. Both her ex-husband and brother-in-law are now dead. Through the interview, Tyson said that he feels that Donham has been changed by the social and legal advances that swept through the South in the past decades.

“That case went a long way toward ruining her life,” Tyson said, explaining how the elderly woman never escaped the case’s notoriety. “She was glad things had changed [and she] thought the old system of white supremacy was wrong, though she had more or less taken it as normal at the time,” he added.

In regards to the heinous crime that took place over the lie, Bryant is described as feeling, “sorrowful,” saying, “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”

Check out the full story here.

Follow us on Twitter: @Tffhthewriter @gripmagonline