In case you missed it, the woman who was at the center of the Emmett Till case—an event that almost certainly ramped the Civil Rights Movement into high gear—admitted a decade ago that she had lied about Till making a pass at her.
That woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, told her story in 2007. If there is any justice in this world, she needs to tell her story again—this time before a judge.
Let’s review, folks. Bryant Donham claims that Till grabbed her by the arm and tried to get her to go on a date with him. That account was knocked down once and for all by the FBI in 2006. However, until Vanity Fair broke the story, one plausible assumption had been that Carolyn had misheard Till. This was Mississippi in 1955, remember. But now she admits that she made it up.
This cannot stand. She has not only admitted to causing a little boy to be murdered, but to at least partly contributing to his killers, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, getting away at trial.
She says she has “tender sorrow” for Mamie. But if that’s the case, why didn’t she come forward sooner? Any defensible reason for her not to do so ended when she divorced her husband, Roy Bryant—and almost certainly died with Roy in 1994. Mamie died in 2003—and was thus denied a chance to know what really happened.
I know first-hand what happens when someone sits on the truth. Many longtime Kossacks know that my ex-wife falsely accused me of making a girl watch X-rated movies. That girl and her mother were rooming with my ex-wife and me at the time. My ex-wife peddled those charges in retaliation for having her son arrested for beating me up.
Apparently someone told them they would be racked up for perjury if they peddled that story in court, because they never showed up. Had that girl’s mother had the decency to come forward and say that this never happened, my ex-wife would be in prison. And had she come forward after the charges were dropped, I would have felt safe in pursuing criminal charges against my ex-wife for framing me. As it was, North Carolina’s cockamamie community property laws would have allowed her to legally drain my bank account dry or take my car in retaliation even though her name wasn’t on either one—and I wouldn’t have had any recourse. The only way I would have felt safe would have been if she had been jailed—which she almost certainly would have been had that girl’s mother had the decency to come forward.
For that reason, I have no sympathy whatsoever for Bryant. If it is legally possible to do so, this woman needs to answer for her cowardice—under oath. And if it isn’t legally possible, she is going to have some explaining to do at some point.