She’s rewriting history. The white woman who accused Emmett Till of making physical and verbal advances toward her in 1955 has admitted in a new book that she lied all those years ago.
Till was a 14-year-old black teenager from Chicago visiting family in the segregated Southern town of Money, Mississippi, in August 1955 when he allegedly whistled at the woman, Carolyn Bryant, then 21, while buying gum at a country store. Bryant’s husband and his half brother, J.W. Milam, later tracked Till down and kidnapped him, torturing and abusing him for days before shooting and bludgeoning him to death and leaving his body in the Tallahatchie River.
During the highly publicized trial, Bryant claimed that Till had also made physical and verbal advances toward her, charges that further polarized the public over Till’s guilt and sensationalized the case.
However, Bryant once admitted to writer Timothy Tyson that her allegations against Till were, in fact, a lie, a Vanity Fair story published on Thursday, January 26, shockingly revealed.
“That part’s not true,” she told Tyson — who was working on a book about the case, The Blood of Emmett Till — during a 2007 interview. Bryant was at that point 72 years old; she is now 82, and her whereabouts are being kept secret by her family, according to Vanity Fair.
Bryant, who now goes by Carolyn Bryant Donham, did not admit to any feelings of guilt, but told Tyson that she “felt tender sorrow … for Mamie Till-Mobley,” Till’s mother, who died in 2003 after spending a lifetime fighting for civil rights. (It is important to note here that Mamie Till famously — and bravely — insisted on allowing her son to have an open-casket funeral so the public could see what had been done to him.)
“When Carolyn herself [later] lost one of her sons, she thought about the grief that Mamie must have felt and grieved all the more,” Tyson wrote, according to Vanity Fair. According to the writer, Bryant even said during the interview, “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”
Till’s murder has long been viewed as one of the main events that set off the civil-rights movement in America in the 1950s, and has been referenced in everything from Toni Morrison’s play Dreaming Emmett to a Bob Dylan song to a Langston Hughes poem.
