Woman who ‘whistled up’ Emmett Till’s murder dies, aged 88

So, the lid may have finally closed on justice for a teenage boy

The woman whose claims led to the torture and murder of teenaged Emmett Till, has died at the age of 88.

The Calcasieu parish coroner’s office in Louisiana confirmed the death of Carolyn Bryant Donham, Mississippi. She had cancer and was in hospice care.

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In 1955, Emmett Till was 14 when, while visiting his family in Mississippi, he was accused by Donham, then aged 21, of whistling, making lewd comments and grabbing her.

Days later, Till was kidnapped at gunpoint by two white men. Evidence indicated that a woman, thought to be Donham, identified Till to them.

We carried this story a while ago, when it first came to public notice again…

Leigh G Banks writes: The little hamlet of Money is notorious. Yet few have heard of this tiny Mississippi delta settlement.

Way back in the Fifties – when its reputation became forever linked with racism, bigotry and child murder – Money was said to be a ‘fine’ place to live…

...or die because of the colour of your skin.

It was a tin-roof town with a giant cotton gin and a church. And that was about it except for Bryant’s, a grocery store where locals, including the families of black share-croppers, would gather.

Then it all went wrong … a black teenager smiled at a white man’s wife. The teenager was called Emmett Till.

Emmett was a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago, and was visiting his uncle Moses Wright.

It was August 1955 and black boys and girls weren’t allowed to flirt. But he tried it with Carolyn Bryant – who owned the store with her husband Roy.

She was supposedly scared. Emmett was tortured, hanged and thrown over the a bridge near the fabled Tallahatchie Bridge.

It was Roy and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, who did it.

Money, Money, Money – it was a white man’s world.

Bob Dylan took up the cudgel and wrote the Ballad of Emmett Till.

He wrote: “And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial

Two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till

But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit thisawful crime

And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind

I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see

The smiling brothers walkin’ down the courthouse stairs

For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free

While Emmett’s body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea

If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust

Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust

Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow

For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!”

And then there is the fiction: Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe

#bobdylan #emmetttill