In the most recent revelation regarding the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, one nugget of new information appears to partially exonerate Carolyn Bryant Donham and supports the decision of two Leflore County grand juries that declined to indict her.
It now seems — based on discredited journalist William Bradford Huie’s long-hidden research notes — that it was unlikely that Donham was in the pickup truck on the night Till was abducted in Money and spirited away in that vehicle toward his torture and death.
Prior to Donham’s death in 2023 at the age of 88, those demanding her prosecution believed that she identified the Black 14-year-old to her then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, and that she knew in doing so she was exposing Till to great harm.
They based this belief largely on the testimony of Till’s great-uncle, Moses Wright, at the trial in which Bryant and Milam were acquitted, despite their obvious guilt.
Wright testified that he heard a voice coming from the pickup truck that identified Till as the boy who had been fresh with Carolyn Bryant — a no-no in the Jim Crow South — a few days earlier at the grocery store in Money that the white woman ran with her husband. Wright said the voice sounded like a woman’s, which led many to conclude that it must have come from Carolyn Bryant.
Among those who thought so was Devery Anderson, who has written one of the more definitive books on the Emmett Till murder.
Anderson told The Washington Post, however, that he now doubts his previous assumption following the donation of 33 pages of Huie’s research notes by the descendants of John Whitten, one of the attorneys who represented the two killers.
Those notes, as well as the letters Huie exchanged with Whitten, prove what had long been suspected about Huie. In his bombshell article in 1956 in Look magazine, he knowingly reported information he believed was false and withheld information that he believed to be true.
The result was mixed.
Milam and Bryant’s post-trial confession helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement by dramatically showing how unjust the justice system was in Mississippi and other parts of the South, in which Blacks — even a young teenager — could be murdered with impunity if they did anything that challenged racial segregation and white supremacy.
But Huie also created the false narrative that the two killers acted alone, that Till had not just been precocious with Carolyn Bryant but had propositioned her, and that he was defiant about it with his abductors. That narrative dominated the public’s understanding about the murder for decades.
Huie was apparently scared that he would lose his “scoop” and the money he expected to make off of it, including a movie deal he hoped to land, if he reported the story straight. The editors at Look insisted that anyone named in the story sign a release form to protect the magazine from libel. The fewer that had to sign, the less risk that Huie would have his story killed.
One detail Huie omitted was the recollection of Moses Wright’s wife, Elizabeth, that a third man, a relative of Milam’s, came into their home on the night of the abduction.
The presence of another man crowded into the cab of the pickup, Anderson told The Washington Post, has him now believing that Carolyn Bryant was not at the kidnapping scene at all. Rather, the author said, it seems more likely that one of the Black men in the back of the pickup identified Till.
If so, then there’s really just one other aspect of the case, also omitted by Huie’s account, on which Carolyn Bryant’s criminal culpability might have hinged. What did she say when Till, after being kidnapped, was brought to the store in Money and she was asked whether he was the one who had spoken to her?
She gave conflicting accounts of what Till did and said at that moment, just as she did about their earlier interaction in the store. But she never backed off her claim that she did not identify him to his killers. That’s what she told the FBI when they investigated decades later. That’s what she said in the memoir that surfaced less than a year before her death.
She might have been lying, but no one could prove it. The other supposed witnesses had been dead for at least a decade before the FBI first looked into the case. No documents have surfaced to refute her claim that she tried to protect Till that night from whatever her husband and the others might do to him.
The news articles, the books and the movies about the murder of Till have been extensive. Gradually they have peeled back layers toward the truth. The full extent of Carolyn Bryant’s role, though, remains heavily clouded in conjecture and may always be.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
