When the U.S. Justice Department in late 2021 closed for the second and probably final time its investigation into the death of Emmett Till, it suggested that historian Timothy Tyson had put federal investigators and those who continued to push for a prosecution on a wild goose chase.
The impetus for that probe was Tyson’s claim that he — of all the journalists, historians and filmmakers who have been absorbed by the 1955 lynching of Till and the mystery of what role Carolyn Bryant Donham had played in it — had been fortunate enough to be there when she partially fessed up.
Tyson revealed that “bombshell” in his 2017 book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” for which he became an overnight celebrity and apparently made a tidy sum.
The problem was, however, that the revelation, which Tyson kept mostly to himself for almost a decade, could not be corroborated, even by the author himself.
He had no tape recording of Donham’s alleged admission that she had lied on the stand at the trial in which Till’s abductors and killers — including her husband at the time — were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury for the racist murder. He gave federal investigators multiple accounts of how such an inexplicable omission occurred. His explanation of why he never came back to the topic in what he did record of their conversations also seemed implausible. His hand-written notes of the confession are much more clipped than what he quoted Donham as saying in his book. Plus the relative of Donham’s who sat in on Tyson’s interviews with the elderly woman, now deceased, said there was no recanting.
All of these inconsistencies and contradictions added together led the U.S. Justice Department to conclude that “Tyson’s account lacks credibility.”
Mississippi’s expert on old civil rights murders — veteran journalist Jerry Mitchell — piled on with the publication this week of his own investigation into Tyson’s claim.
Mitchell interacted with Tyson at the time the North Carolina historian was conducting the interviews with Donham, and Mitchell had an inkling that the story didn’t add up when it came out in print. His suspicions were seemingly confirmed by his own research. Among the tell-tale nuggets. “Tyson told me Donham’s recantation took place in July 2008,” Mitchell wrote. “The problem with that date? He hadn’t met her yet, according to emails he wrote in August 2008 to her family.”
What’s to be done about what appears to be one more fabrication in a long line of them in the history of the Emmett Till case? Not much.
Whatever money Tyson has made or will make on his book is going to remain his. Even if Donham never admitted to him or anyone else that she lied under oath, the consensus of historians and journalists is that she did.
Still, with the major revelation of Tyson’s book now discredited, any accolades the book received should be rescinded. That would include asking him to return the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award he received in 2018.
Movies may embellish the past to make a story more interesting. Works of history are not supposed to. Tyson, according to his detractors, broke that ethical line. If so, the dishonesty should not be awarded any of the trappings of scholarly esteem.
