The white woman who accused Black teenager Emmett Till of making improper advances before he was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 says she neither identified him to the killers nor wanted him murdered. In an unpublished memoir obtained by the AP, Carolyn Bryant Donham says she was unaware of what would happen to the 14-year-old Till, who lived in Chicago and was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was abducted, killed, and tossed in a river. Now 87, Donham was only 21 at the time. Her then-husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam were acquitted of murder charges but later confessed in a magazine interview.
The contents of the 99-page manuscript, titled I Am More Than A Wolf Whistle, were first reported by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. Historian and author Timothy Tyson, who said he obtained a copy from Donham while interviewing her in 2008, provided a copy to the AP on Thursday. 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 following the recent discovery of an arrest warrant on kidnapping charges that was issued for Donham in 1955 but never served.
"The potential for an investigation was more important than the archival agreements, though those are important things," Tyson said. "But this is probably the last chance for an indictment in this case." Deborah Watts, a cousin of Till who leads the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, said the memoir is new evidence that shows Donham's involvement in the case and is particularly important when combined with the arrest warrant. In the memoir, Donham says she attempted to help Till once he'd been located by her husband and brother-in-law and brought to her in the middle of the night for identification.
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"I did not wish Emmett any harm and could not stop harm from coming to him, since I didn’t know what was planned for him," Donham says in the manuscript compiled by her daughter-in-law. "I tried to protect him by telling Roy that 'He’s not the one. That’s not him. Please take him home.'" She claims in the manuscript that Till, who had been dragged from a family home at gunpoint in the middle of the night, spoke up and identified himself. Donham adds that she "always felt like a victim as well as Emmett" and "paid dearly with an altered life" for what happened to him. (Read more on the memoir here, including contradictions included in it that raise serious questions.)
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