Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman accused of being the mastermind behind the Emmett Till lynching nearly 70 years ago, has died at the age of 88.
She had been battling cancer and was in hospice care, according to Mississippi Today. Mississippi grand jury declined to indict her in August last year over 14-year-old Till’s death.
Who was Roy Bryant?
Carolyn was married to Roy Bryant, an ex-soldier. Roy, along with his wife, was linked to Till’s death in 1955. The couple ran a small grocery, Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market. They lived in two small rooms in the back of the store and had two sons.
Roy worked as a trucker with his half-brother J. W. Milam, who had served in World War II and received combat medals.
When the incident originally started, on the evening of August 24, 1955, Roy was out of town on a trucking job. Emmett Till had walked into Bryant’s Grocery and bought two cents’ worth of bubble gum. An unknown confrontation went down between Carolyn and Till and the former stormed out of the shop. Till got to know from the kids outside that she had gone to fetch a pistol and he left the scene, scared.
Roy got to know about the entire incident after returning home from the children outside. At the time, the separation between blacks and whites was defined by law in the South, where they lived. Roy and his half-brother went to Till’s house on August 28 at 2:20 am and took him away. The boy’s corpse was found several days later, disfigured and decomposing in the Tallahatchie River.
Also Read | Emmett Till lynching: All that happened
Roy, Carolyn, and J. W. became celebrities after the 3 were named as suspects in Bryant’s death. Some reporters who were covering the trial even alluded to Carolyn as “Roy Bryant’s most attractive wife” and a “crossroads Marilyn Monroe.”
In 1994, Roy died without ever doing time for Till’s death.
