Carolyn Bryant Donham dies at 88; her words doomed Emmett Till

Only two people knew exactly what happened during the minute they were alone together in the general store in Money, Mississippi, on Aug. 24, 1955. One, Emmett Till, a Black teenager visiting from Chicago, died four days later, at 14, in a brutal murder that stands out even in America's long history of racial injustice.

The other was Carolyn Bryant. She was the 21-year-old white proprietress 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 to her, grabbed her roughly by the waist and let loose a wolf whistle.

Now Bryant, more recently known as Carolyn Bryant Donham, has died at 88. The Calcasieu Parish coroner's office confirmed the death of Bryant on Tuesday in Westlake, Louisiana.

The truth of what happened that August day may now never be clear. More than half a century after the murder, she admitted that she had perjured herself on the witness stand to make Till's conduct sound more threatening than it actually was — serving, in the words of the historian to whom she made the admission, as "the mouthpiece of a monstrous lie."

"She said with respect to the physical assault on her, or anything menacing or sexual, that that part isn't true," the historian, Timothy B. Tyson, told "CBS This Morning" in 2017.

But in an unpublished memoir that surfaced last year, Bryant stood by her earlier description of events, though she said she had tried to discourage her husband from harming Till.

"He came in our store and put his hands on me with no provocation," she wrote. "Do I think he should have been killed for doing that? Absolutely, unequivocally, no!"

The murder of Emmett Till was a watershed in United States race relations. Coverage of the killing and its aftermath, including a widely disseminated photograph of Till's brutalized body at his open-casket funeral, inspired anguish and outrage, helped propel the modern civil rights movement and ultimately contributed to the demise of Jim Crow.

A former beauty queen described in the news media as having been poor, unworldly and little educated in 1955, Bryant was very much a product of her time and place, as her trial testimony, given under oath, makes plain.

Describing him with a racial slur — as recorded in a trial transcript, long thought to have been lost, that resurfaced in 2004 — she said Till had come into the store and "put his left hand on my waist, and he put his other hand over on the other side." She added, "He said, 'What's the matter, baby? Can't you take it?'"

Bryant further testified that Till had made an obscene remark, which she refused to repeat in court, about his sexual prowess with white women. As news accounts reported afterward, her testimony carried the unmistakable implication that she feared being raped.

"I was just scared to death," she testified.

After deliberating for little more than an hour, the all-white, all-male jury acquitted her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother J.W. Milam. Carolyn Bryant was not charged.

Secure in the knowledge that double jeopardy would attach, the two men admitted the killing the next year. Milam died in 1980, Roy Bryant in 1994.

In 2008, Carolyn Bryant admitted that she had fabricated the most inflammatory parts of her testimony — the assertions that Till had grabbed her roughly around the waist and had uttered a sexual obscenity — at the behest of defense lawyers and her husband's family.

"You tell these stories for so long that they seem true," she told Tyson, a senior research scholar at Duke University, that year. "But that part is not true."

That interview became the foundation of Tyson's nonfiction book, "The Blood of Emmett Till" (2017). Its disclosure of Bryant's fabrication made headlines around the world.

Madge Carolyn Holloway was born on July 23, 1934, on a plantation near Cruger, Mississippi. Her father, who died when she was a teenager, worked as a plantation manager and prison guard.

A petite, attractive, dark-haired young woman, Carolyn won two high school beauty pageants. In 1951, at 16, she left school to elope with Roy Bryant, a 20-year-old Army infantryman she had met at a party two years before.

Settling in Money, a tiny Delta town, the couple ran Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market, which catered mainly to Black sharecroppers. By 1955 they had two sons, Roy Jr., 3, and Thomas Lamar, 2. The family lived in rooms at the rear of the store.

Emmett Till, known to friends and family as Bobo, arrived in Mississippi by train on Saturday, Aug. 20, or Sunday, Aug. 21, 1955 — accounts differ as to the precise date. By the 21st, he had settled in at the home of a great-uncle, Moses Wright, near Money.

On the evening of Wednesday, Aug. 24, Till drove with a group of local Black teenagers to the Bryants' store. Among them were 18-year-old Ruth Crawford and Simeon Wright, Till's 12-year-old cousin.

Till went into the store to buy a small item, most likely two cents' worth of bubble gum. Roy Bryant, who moonlighted as a trucker, was out of town. Carolyn Bryant was tending the counter.

By most accounts, Till was alone with Bryant for not much more than a minute before one of his companions — in Simeon Wright's recollection, it was he — concerned that Emmett would not know how to comport himself around a Southern white woman, went in to fetch him.

"While I was in the store, Bobo did nothing inappropriate," Wright recounted in his 2010 memoir. But whatever transpired during the minute that Till was alone with Bryant precipitated all that followed.

On Sunday, Aug. 28, a few hours after midnight, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam drove to the home of Till's great-uncle Moses Wright. Holding Wright at gunpoint, they demanded Till.

After taking Till from his great-uncle's, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam drove him to the Bryants' store. It is beyond dispute that they presented him to Carolyn Bryant there. She said afterward that she had replied that he was the wrong person.

Leaving Carolyn Bryant at the store, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, accompanied by several other men — white associates, as well as Black employees conscripted under duress — drove Till toward Drew, Mississippi, about 30 miles away.

Just outside Drew, on a plantation managed by Leslie Milam, J.W.'s brother, they beat Till savagely. One of the group, possibly J.W. Milam, shot Till in the head. Driving to the Tallahatchie River, the men used barbed wire to lace a cotton-gin fan around Till's neck and dumped his body in the water.

Later that Sunday, Aug. 28, Roy Bryant was arrested in connection with Till's disappearance. J.W. Milam was arrested the next day.

On Aug. 30, Carolyn Bryant gave her first statement to her husband's lawyers. At that point, Till's body had not been discovered, and the men were suspected only of kidnapping.

As reported in Tyson's book, Carolyn Bryant's initial statement was comparatively benign. She "charged only that Till had 'insulted' her, not grabbed her, and certainly not attempted to rape her."

The killers clearly never expected Till to be found: The fan to which they had lashed him weighed some 70 pounds. But on Aug. 31, Till's body was recovered from the river. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were charged with his murder.

In a second interview with defense lawyers, on Sept. 2, Carolyn Bryant's statement had assumed more dramatic form. But it nonetheless described a milder scenario than the one she would recount in court:

"When I went to take money he grabbed my hand and said, 'How about a date?'" she said in that statement. "And I walked away from him and he said, 'What's the matter, baby, can't you take it?' He went out the door and said 'Goodbye' and I went out to car and got pistol and when I came back he whistled at me."

The trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam for the murder of Emmett Louis Till opened in Sumner, Mississippi, on Sept. 19. On Sept. 22, Carolyn Bryant took the witness stand.

She testified to the wolf whistle, described in her statement of Sept. 2. But now she also testified to Till's "strong grip" when he grabbed her hand, his pursuit of her through the store, his catching of her around the waist and his use of a sexual obscenity — elements not present in either of her pretrial statements.

On Sept. 23, at 2:34 p.m., the case went to the jury. Returning at 3:42, they pronounced the defendants not guilty of Till's murder. They would have reached their verdict even sooner, a juror said afterward, had they not taken a break.

Carolyn Bryant divorced her husband in 1975, citing in court papers "habitual drunkenness" and "habitual cruel and inhuman treatment." She married at least twice more. By all accounts, Bryant, who resided for many years in Greenville, Mississippi, lived a life of self-imposed circumscription. In later years, she lived in Raleigh, North Carolina.

In 2008, Bryant sought out Tyson: She had read and liked his 2004 book, "Blood Done Sign My Name," a nonfiction account of the murder of a young Black man by whites in North Carolina in 1970. She wanted, she told him, to explain her side of the story.

Interviewed by Tyson, Bryant admitted that she had lied on the stand. As for the rest of what transpired that night, the precise narrative had, with the passage of time, became unclear even to her.

As Tyson wrote in his 2017 book, "The preponderance of evidence does tell us that almost from the moment of the incident between her and Emmett at the store on August 24, she was frightened of its escalating consequences and probably sought to avoid them."

In her unpublished memoir, which Bryant wrote in old age, she continued to maintain that Till had whistled at her.

In "Simeon's Story," Till's cousin Simeon Wright also recalled hearing him whistle. However, as Bryant told Tyson in 2008, "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him."

What Till may actually have done inside the Bryants' store that day, Tyson's book reports — drawing on news media interviews decades later with Simeon Wright and Ruth Crawford — was to break a Jim Crow taboo of which he was almost certainly unaware:

Instead of placing the money for his purchase onto the store counter, they said, young Emmett Till put his two cents directly into Bryant's hand, in the process touching her pale white skin.