White woman at centre of notorious Mississippi lynching case dies at 88

Carolyn Bryant Donham (AP Photo/Gene Herrick, File)

Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman who accused black teenager Emmett Till of making improper advances before he was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, has died at the age of 88.

She died on Tuesday night in hospice care in Westlake, Louisiana, according to a death report filed in Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office.

Emmett’s kidnapping and killing became a catalyst for the civil rights movement when his mother insisted on an open-coffin funeral in their home town of Chicago after his brutalised body was pulled from a river in Mississippi.

Emmett Till (AP)

He had travelled from Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi in August 1955 when Ms Donham — then named Carolyn Bryant — accused him of making improper advances to her at a grocery store in the small community of Money.

The Rev Wheeler Parker, a cousin of Emmett who was there, said the 14-year-old whistled at the woman, an act that flew in the face of Mississippi’s racist social codes of the era.

Evidence indicates a woman identified Emmett to her then-husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother JW Milam, who killed the teenager.

An all-white jury acquitted the two white men in the killing, but the men later confessed in an interview with Look magazine.

In an unpublished memoir obtained by the Associated Press in 2022, Ms Donham – who was 21 at the time of the killing – said she was unaware of what would happen to the 14-year-old.

The contents of the 99-page manuscript, titled I Am More Than A Wolf Whistle, were first reported by the Mississippi Centre for Investigative Reporting.

Historian and author Timothy Tyson, who said he obtained a copy from Ms Donham while interviewing her in 2008, provided a copy to the AP.

Mr Tyson had placed the manuscript in an archive at the University of North Carolina with the agreement that it not be made public for decades, though he said he gave it to the FBI during an investigation the agency concluded last year.

He said he decided to make it public now after the recent discovery of an arrest warrant on kidnapping charges that was issued for Ms Donham in 1955 but never served.