Only two people knew exactly what was happening the minute they were alone together at the store in Money, Miss. , in one of the most groundbreaking murders in American history.
The other was Carolyn Bryant. She was the 21-year-old white owner 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, grabbed her roughly by the waist, and released a wolf whistle .
Now Mrs. Bryant has passed away, at the age of 88. Megan LeBoeuf, the chief investigator for the coroner’s office of Calcasieu parish in Louisiana, sent Tuesday in Westlake, a small town in southern Louisiana. Ms. LeBoeuf gives no further information.
With Mrs. Donham’s death, the truth about what happened that August day will never be clear. More than half a century after the murder, she admitted to perjury on the witness stand to make Till’s behavior sound more menacing than it actually was. mouthpiece of a monstrous lie.”
“She said in regards to the physical assault on her, or anything menacing or sexual, that part isn’t true,” historian Timothy B. Tyson told CBS This Morning in 2017.
But in an unpublished memoir that surfaced last year, Ms Donham stuck to her earlier description of the events, though she said she had tried to discourage her husband from harming Till.
“He came into our store and laid his hands on me for no reason at all,” she wrote. ‘Do I think he should have been killed for that? Absolutely, unequivocally, no!”
The Till family said the account was riddled with inaccuracies.
The murder of Emmett Till marked a turning point in race relations in the United States. The coverage of the murder and its aftermath, including a widely circulated photo of Till’s battered body at his open casket burial, sparked fear and outrage, helped propel the modern civil rights movement, and ultimately contributed to Jim Crow’s downfall.
Mrs. Bryant, as she was then known, was a former beauty queen who was described in the news media in 1955 as poor, unworldly and undereducated. , clarify.
Describing him with a racist slur – as recorded in a trial transcript, long thought lost, which resurfaced in 2004 – she said Till had entered the store and “put his left hand on my waist and he put his other hand laid. on the other hand.” She added: “He said, ‘What’s the matter, baby? Can’t you handle it?’”
Ms. Bryant further testified that Till made an obscene remark, which she refused to repeat in court, about his sexual prowess with white women. As news reports later reported, her testimony carried the undeniable implication that she feared being raped.
“I was just terrified,” she testified.
After deliberating just over an hour, the all-white, all-male jury acquitted her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother JW Milam. Ms. Bryant, who testified for the defense, was not charged.
Safe in the knowledge that there would be double jeopardy, the two men admitted to the murder the following year in a Look magazine article for which they were paid. Mr Milam died in 1980, Mr Bryant in 1994.
Although Mrs. Bryant had testified without the jury present, her description of Till’s behavior was taken up again by onlookers in the courtroom and members of the press. As a result, it has remained in the public memory as a canonical narrative of the events of that August night—long believed in some quarters, long doubted in others.
Then, in 2008, she admitted to fabricating the most inflammatory parts of her testimony — the claims that Till grabbed her roughly around the waist and uttered sexual obscenities — at the behest of her defense attorneys and family. man.
“You tell these stories so long that they seem true,” she told Dr. Tyson, a senior researcher at Duke University. “But that part isn’t true.”
That interview became the basis of Dr. Tyson, “The Blood of Emmett Till” (2017). The revelation of Mrs. Bryant’s fabrication made headlines around the world.
A full obituary will follow shortly.
