As word spread last week that Carolyn Bryant Donham had died, some of those who had been pushing for her to face criminal charges in the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till were not shy about voicing their disappointment.
“Carolyn Bryant’s legacy will be one of dishonesty and injustice,” said Malik Z. Shabazz, who earlier this year filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of a Till relative trying to compel Leflore County Sheriff Ricky Banks to serve a 68-year-old arrest warrant that was null. “A legacy that verifies that Mississippi coddles and protects white supremacy.”
Patrick Weems, executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, accused Donham of trying to protect those who murdered Till, including her ex-husband, her entire adult life. “While the world saw the horrors of racism, and the real consequences of hatred, what the world will never see is remorse or responsibility for Emmett’s death,” Weems said.
And Keith Beauchamp, the filmmaker whose documentary on Till’s brutal slaying helped prompt the federal reopening of the investigation almost 20 years ago, captured the disappointment most succinctly. “Damn, damn, damn,” he told a reporter after learning of Donham’s death. “... The good old American judicial system has failed us once again.”
The crusade to put Donham behind bars often seemed, however, more motivated by vengeance than justice. Twice the FBI looked into the case, and twice it concluded there were no federal charges to bring against Donham. Twice the evidence against her was presented to racially mixed grand juries in Leflore County, and they concluded that there was insufficient evidence to indict her either for Till’s killing or his kidnapping. Still, that did not end the hounding to which Donham was subjected for the last decades of her life.
Donham was no heroine, that’s for certain. From the time of the lynching, she gave inconsistent and factually dubious accounts of her fatal interchange with Till in her store and of the last time she saw him a few days later. There was speculation — never proven, though — that she was in the vehicle that snatched Till at gunpoint away from his great-uncle’s home in Money, and that she identified him to her murderous husband and brother-in-law as the Black teenager who had been fresh with her.
But speculation does not a criminal case make. Even if it had been Donham in the vehicle, prosecutors would still have had to prove that she was a willing participant in the kidnapping or that she knew her positive identification of Till equated to a death sentence.
Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam got away with a terrible injustice, one so egregious that it helped galvanize the civil rights movement. Because of the segregationist social customs of the time, the two white men were able to kill a Black 14-year-old with impunity, knowing that no all-white, all-male jury in Mississippi was going to convict them for enforcing a taboo that said Black men were to stay away from white women.
Letting Bryant and Milam get away with their brutal crime was horrendous. But it would not have been right either to try to make Donham pay for their sins or for those of a white supremacist era by putting her on trial in her 80s.
The lust for vengeance, however, was seemingly unquenchable. It didn’t matter that she spent the last years of her life mostly in hiding, or that she had terminal cancer. The only thing that would end the pursuit of her was her death.
And that’s what it ultimately took.
