Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman at the center of the Emmett Till lynching, died at 88 years old on Tuesday in Westlake, Louisiana, marking the death of the last person directly involved in the case that spurred a civil rights movement in the '90s.
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The Calcasieu Parish coroner's office confirmed the death of the woman, whose role in the brutal death of Black teen Till in Mississippi was reconsidered by a grand jury last year. A few weeks before the jury declined to indict Donham, a 1955 arrest warrant for her was located on a charge of kidnapping Till. The warrant had never been served.
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Till was 14 when he was beaten and shot to death after allegedly whistling at Bryant - now Donham. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and J.W. Milam, beat Till up before shooting him in the head and tossing his body into the Tallahatchie River. An all-White jury acquitted both when Carolyn Bryant testified that Emmett grabbed and threatened her verbally. Milam, who died in 1980, and Bryant, who died in 1994, admitted to the killing in a 1956 interview with Look magazine.
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“Carolyn Bryant’s death brings a conclusion to a painful chapter for the Emmett Till family and for Black peoples in America. The tragic part about Bryant’s death was that she was never held accountable for her role in the death of young Emmett Till, who is the martyr for the Civil Rights Movement,” Malik Shabazz, with Black Lawyers for Justice, said in a statement.
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