Emmett & Carolyn
(If you are bothered by someone speaking ill of the dead, you should stop reading).
Carolyn Bryant Donham, who falsely accused 14-year-old Emmett Till of sexual harassment, died on Tuesday. Donham was 88 years old and had cancer.
Emmett’s subsequent lynching and its aftermath was a galvanizing moment for the Civil Rights movement. The gruesome pictures of his open-casket funeral were a stark reminder of how little the American South had changed since slavery.
Donham’s then husband Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were tried and acquitted of Emmett’s murder, then, protected by double jeopardy, both men admitted to Emmett’s kidnapping and murder in a Look magazine interview.
There is little doubt today that the teenager said anything remotely offensive to Donham, and a controversial interview purportedly contained a confession from Donham that the young man had done nothing wrong.
Regardless of whether she confessed or not during the interview, Donham was responsible for a youngster’s brutal murder.
Her senior citizen status doesn’t change that fact.
Neither does her dying of cancer.
At least she lived a long life, whether the circumstances were her choosing or not.
She may have been abused by her husband. She may have been frightened of him.
Black people were routinely frightened, abused, and often murdered in her home state of Mississippi.
And Alabama.
And Georgia.
And the Carolinas.
And so on…
At some point, even if it was in the seventies or eighties, she should have told the truth.
At some point, even if it was in the seventies or eighties, she should have been prosecuted if not for perjury, for helping to violate Emmett Till’s civil rights.
The right to visit southern relatives without returning home in a coffin.
The right to live and breathe freely as White teenagers did.
The right to fight and possibly die in Vietnam.
To march for his freedom.
To join the Black Panthers.
To marry, raise children, and live to be 88 or even older.
But Emmett Till never had the chance to live.
He was brutally murdered, in a fashion that disputes the humanity of his killers rendering them no better than wild beasts.
Bryant and Milam did the killing, but Carolyn went to her grave with the same blood on her hands.
She was just as guilty.
She gave them an excuse.
Even though they didn’t need much of an excuse in 1955.
(Come to think of it, they don’t need much of an excuse in 2023).
The ghosts of Mississippi are not really ghosts.
They are not really dead.
They live and breathe.
In Mississippi.
In Alabama.
In Georgia.
In the Carolinas.
In Kentucky.
In Minnesota.
All over America.
And they all have blood on their hands.
Just like Carolyn.