Enough!
In 1955, Carolyn Bryant Donham (then simply Carolyn Bryant), a 21-year-old white woman, accused Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, of making an unwanted advance towards her.
Those accusations led to the brutal murder of the boy. Her then-husband, Roy Bryant, and brother-in-law, JW Milam, were charged with the crime.
Now the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting has obtained a copy of an unpublished memoir from Donham in which she allegedly wrote that she “tried to protect” the boy by telling her husband, “It’s not him. That’s not him. Please take him home.”
And, in an astonishing stroke of insensitivity, she wrote that she “always felt like a victim, just like Emmett.”
Ma’am, quiet! You’ve been alive for nearly 67 years since Till’s bloated body was fished out of the Tallahatchie River with a gin fan tied around his neck.
Donham is an older woman now, but let’s be clear: don’t shed a single tear.
Not only did she accuse Till of making inappropriate advances the day she first met the boy, she raised the stakes during the trial, saying that Till also physically assaulted her, clutching her hand so hard it was difficult to to pull it free, then grabbed her around her waist.
She casually called the murdered boy the N-word during the trial, referring to Till as an N-word “man,” even though everyone knew he was a boy by the time of the trial.
And she wasn’t the only one who mislabeled him. At one point, the attorney asked, “When you got your gun, Mrs. Bryant, where was this boy? Or should I say, where was this man?”
The maturation of black children continues unabated as a means of justifying lethal violence applied to their bodies. When police shot Tamir Rice within seconds of arriving at the scene in a Cleveland park, the officer who called the shooting said, “shots fired, man down, black man, maybe 20.” Rice was 12 years old.
In Donham’s interview with the FBI in the mid-2000s when the case was reopened, she said the boy approached her and said, “As soon as he touched me, I started screaming for Juanita.” There was no screaming in the original testimony.
In his 2017 book, historian Timothy Tyson claimed that Donham recanted parts of her testimony from the trial, writing, “But regarding her testimony that Till grabbed her around her waist and voiced obscenities, she now told me, ‘That part is not true.’ ”
Donham’s family denies having revoked it.
One question lingers: Donham was involved in Till’s kidnapping. Till’s uncle Moses testified at trial that when Bryant and Milam kidnapped the boy, they took him outside to their car, where a third person identified him with a voice that seemed to him “a lighter voice than a man’s.”
Late last month, an unserved arrest warrant for Donham “on charges of kidnapping” was found in the basement of a Mississippi courthouse. But in a statement Donham gave in 1955, she says she “didn’t go to this Negro’s house,” but instead Bryant brought the boy to her to identify himself.
But according to an author’s report Douglas O. LinderEarlier in the day of the kidnapping, Donham was in the truck with Bryant and Milam “looking for their target” when they grabbed another black man before throwing him out of the truck after Donham said he didn’t have the right N-word used to be.
When Bryant and Milam were acquitted at trial, the killers kissed their wives, lit cigars and posed for the photo. Donham was one of the women kissed. Where was the repentance? Where is it now?
Less than a year after the trial ended, in 1956, Bryant and Milam confessed to the gruesome murder in an interview with Look magazine. Still, Donham remained married to the killer for about 20 years after Till was killed and never did anything about it.
In the memoir she writes that when her husband brought the boy to her for identification, until “a strange smile turned on me and said, ‘Yes, it was me,’ or something to that effect.” He didn’t behave “the least bit scared,” she wrote.
By the way, this is the same reason Milam gave Look for the boy’s murder. Although Bryant and Milam took turns whipping the boy into a barn early in the morning with a gun, Milam said: “We were never able to startle him. They had just filled him so full with that poison that he was hopeless.”
The justice system has been refusing to charge Donham with any crime for decades, and on Friday an aide to the Mississippi Attorney General made it clear there are no plans to reopen the case against Donham now.
But beyond the criminal measure, Donham failed to pass the moral measure. She has failed at every turn to offer a redeeming word or deed for the boy’s murder and her part in it. The words we’ve seen from this memoir don’t cut it.
The only sympathy I have for this case is for Emmett Till and his family. For Donham I have only questions and contempt.