Recently emerged book sheds new light on lynching after grand jury declined to charge Carolyn Bryant Donham

By her own telling, Carolyn Bryant Donham received preferential treatment rather than prosecution by Mississippi authorities after her encounter with Emmett Till led to the lynching of the Black teenager in the summer of 1955.

Instead of arresting Donham on a warrant that accused her of kidnapping days after Till’s abduction, an officer passed along word that relatives would take her and her two young sons away from home amid a rising furor over the case, Donham said in a 2008 memoir made public last month. The sheriff would later claim Donham, 21 at the time, could not be located for arrest.

Carolyn Bryant Donham, 87, mentions in her unpublished book that she didn’t wish Till any harm nor could she protect him

The white woman who accused Black teenager Emmett Till of making improper advances before he was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 says she neither identified him to the killers nor wanted him murdered.

In an unpublished memoir obtained by the Associated Press, Carolyn Bryant Donham says she was unaware of what would happen to the 14-year-old Till, who lived in Chicago and was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was abducted, killed and tossed in a river. Now 87, Donham was only 21 at the time.