GREENWOOD — Maybe it’s time to let Carolyn Bryant Donham be.
Off and on for more than a dozen years, Donham has been thrust unwantedly into the spotlight, either as a historical mystery or as possibly the last person standing who might pay for a 1955 racist atrocity.
Now 82, she’s back in the news again, following the publication of the latest book on Emmett Till, the precocious black 14-year-old who was brutally murdered for being fresh with Donham in her former life as Carolyn Bryant, the pretty 21-year-old white shopkeeper at a country store in Money.
Timothy Tyson’s “The Blood of Emmett Till” is not quite the blockbuster that some in the Mississippi and national media have made it out to be.
Donham, says Tyson, a research scholar at Duke University, gave him a pair of interviews in 2008 in which she acknowledged fabricating a lot of her story of what took place during the one minute that she and Till were alone in Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. During the 1955 murder trial of her then-husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, Donham testified that Till grabbed her and sexually propositioned her. She repeated much of that claim a half-century later when the U.S. Justice Department reopened an investigation into the case.
That Tyson interviewed Donham is noteworthy, as he is the first to break her longstanding public silence. Her recanting, not so much.
Two years ago, in a passage that seemed to be largely overlooked from Devery Anderson’s painstaking history, “Emmett Till: The Murder that Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement,” the author leaked Tyson’s scoop.
Long before that, though, it was suspected by historians, journalists and authorities that Donham lied when she testified in 1955 — testimony, by the way, that the jury that wrongfully acquitted Till’s killers never heard.
Anderson also reported that the FBI agent who interviewed Donham during the federal agency’s two-year reinvestigation didn’t believe everything she was telling him.
Nevertheless, a decade after the U.S. Justice Department concluded there were no federal charges to bring, and a racially balanced Leflore County grand jury concluded the same on possible state charges, some are using Tyson’s book to say let’s take another look.
Why?
She can’t be charged, because of the statute of limitations, for lying either at her former husband’s trial or to the FBI.
The crimes that don’t have a time clock — being a participant or an accessory to Till’s murder — were considered by those Leflore County grand jurors in 2007. The evidence to make any of the charges stick was weak, even the district attorney who presented the case, Joyce Chiles, acknowledges.
With a less even-handed prosecutor than Chiles, Donham probably would have been indicted back then. But Chiles says, What would have been the point? A conviction would have been doubtful or would have been overturned on appeal.
Any new prosecution would have to hang on proving that Donham was the heretofore unknown person who identified Till to his abductors from inside the vehicle that spirited him away from his great-uncle’s home. Even if authorities could prove that, though, they would have to show she was a willing accomplice AND that she knew of the abductors’ homicidal intent. It’s more likely that whatever her role, it was done out of fear of what her husband might do to her.
It would be good if Donham, for historical purposes alone, were to give a full and honest account of what transpired. Perhaps she has done so in the memoir that’s locked up in the University of North Carolina archives until 2036 or until she dies.
The honorable course is to wait her out. To use the threat of prosecution to coerce her to tell her story before she wants it told is a misuse of the criminal justice system.
Besides the historically curious, there are those who remain frustrated because no one has been brought to justice in an earthly court for Till’s death.
They overlook, though, the price that Donham has already paid.
For more than six decades, she has been associated with one of the most infamous crimes in U.S. history. In the twilight of her life, she’s had to live periodically like a hunted animal, hiding from the media first in Greenville, Mississippi, and now Raleigh, North Carolina. She’s had to worry, and must worry now, whether a politically motivated prosecutor will haul her into court. And, if Tyson’s account is accurate, she has been haunted by feelings of regret.
She has not gotten off scot-free.
Kalich is editor and publisher of The Greenwood Commonwealth.
