Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman who accused African-American teenager Emmett Till in 1955 of making an admiring whistle at her in a grocery store, has died at 88. For this reason, Emmett Till was lynched by two white men. The following text was originally published in the App of «la Lettura».
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
NEW YORK — “They had to see what I saw. The whole nation had to witness it.” So Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Tillhe explained in his autobiography entitled The death of innocence, the reason why he decided to leave his son’s coffin open during the funeral, crowded by tens of thousands of people in Chicago. Open the coffin to open America’s eyes. He wanted everyone to see how it had been beaten and killed that 14-year-old boy by two white men in Mississippi 1955. Passing in front of the glass-covered coffin, some fainted, others were so shocked that they immediately left the church. “People couldn’t have imagined what had happened unless they saw the result of what had happened,” said Mamie, who allowed Jet magazine, which covered the stories of black people in America, to publish a photo of Emmett’s disfigured face and then testified in court and traveled across the country to tell his story. The verdict of the trial, on the other hand, was almost taken for granted for her, so much so that she was not present in court when it was pronounced: the two murderers were acquitted.
Many black Americans grew up learning the story of Emmett Till, thanks to his mother’s refusal to remain silent. His unpunished murder was one of the catalysts for the civil rights movement. The story of that mother who, like others after her and up to the present day in the black American community, had to bury her boy, a victim of racism, is told in history books and inspired a recent film by the director Chononye Chukwu.
Mamie, who moved to Chicago from Mississippi during the “Great Migration” of the first half of the 20th century that drove six million black Americans from the South, didn’t want Emmett – Bobo as she called him – to go to Money, Mississippi in summer of 1955. He was born in Chicago in 1941, he didn’t know the rules of the South. But he wanted to go with his cousins to see an uncle for a week. The single mother gave in. She made Emmett promise that she would not speak to any whites unless they spoke to them first; and that, if a white woman walked towards him, she would lower her head and never look into her eyes. But Emmett thought Mom was exaggerating: “It can’t be that bad, Mom.” She replied, “Bo, it’s much worse.”
Between 1877 and 1950, as documented by the Equal Justice Initiative, over 4,400 black men, women and children were lynched, mostly in the southern United States. They were often hanged from trees, hence songs like “Strange Fruit” (strange fruit) made famous by Billie Holiday. Mississippi was something of a hate crime capital, with at least 600 victims during that time, more than any other state. That same summer, two other black men – George Lee and Lamar Smith – were lynched, but their stories remained largely unknown. Mamie made sure Emmett’s death was not forgotten.
Shortly after Emmett’s arrival in Mississippi, a white woman, Carolyn Bryant21 years, she accused him of making an admiring boo at her in a grocery store. Her husband and brother-in-law, Roy Bryant and JW Milam, kidnapped Emmett from his uncle’s house in the night. They beat him, fracturing his femur, skull and wrists – as revealed by a recent autopsy after the exhumation of the body – and shot him in the head. They threw the body into the Tallahatchie River. On September 23, 1955, an all-white jury acquitted the killers after meeting to deliberate for just 67 minutes. His uncle, Moses Wright, had identified the two men in court as the kidnappers of his nephew in the middle of the night; for this he had to leave Mississippi, which had become too dangerous for him, and moved to Chicago. In an interview of January 1956 published in the magazine «Look», the two men admitted to having committed the crime, no longer fearing the consequences. There was never a federal trial. But that tragedy would leave a mark. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give her seat on the bus to Montgomery Alabama. Rosa would later tell Mamie that she was thinking of Emmett Till that day.
In 2007, after Mamie died, buried next to her son in Chicago, an inscription was posted on the bank of the Tallahatchie River, to remember the boy. In 2008 it was stolen. When it was replaced, someone fired 317 bullets at the new one. The same thing also happened to the third sign. The fourth is bulletproof. In 2022 the case was reopened, with an attempt to try the woman, Carolyn Bryant, still alive and 87, for kidnapping and manslaughter. In fact, it was discovered that an arrest warrant never delivered had also been issued for her 70 years before her, as well as for her now deceased husband and brother-in-law. In an unpublished autobiography, the woman says that the two men brought Emmett Till to her that night, so that she could identify him. She claims that she tried to help him by denying it was him, but that it was the boy who claimed to have booed. A Mississippi jury scheduled to decide whether to indict the woman in 2022 said the evidence against her was insufficient.