The murder of Emmet Till, kidnapped and killed in 1955, is one of the darkest chapters of racial segregation in the American South.
A white American woman who complained of alleged disrespect from a black teenager, later kidnapped and killed in 1955, has died at the age of 88, closing one of the darkest chapters of racial segregation in the southern UNITED STATES.
Carolyn Bryant Donham died overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday, confirmed to AFP Megan LeBoeuf, an official of the administrative division (or parish) of Calcasieu, in Louisiana.
Last year, a court decided not to charge Carolyn Bryant with complicity in the Mississippi kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who has become a poignant symbol of the struggle for civil rights.
The photos of the corpse made history
Originally from Chicago, young Emmett had traveled to this Deep South state to visit family members.
Carolyn Bryant, then 21 years old, had assured that he had whistled her and had tried to grope her when she met her in a grocery store. As a result of his accusations, the teenager was kidnapped. His body, horribly mutilated, was found 72 hours later in a river.
Emmett Till’s mother had demanded that his casket remain open at his funeral, so that the world would realize the abuse he had endured. Photos of the unrecognizable body have gone down in history.
A central catalyst of the civil rights movement
Arrested for the murder, Roy Bryant -the husband of Carolyn Bryant- and JW Milam, his half-brother, had been acquitted by an all-white jury. Protected by this verdict, the two white men then told a magazine how they had killed the teenager. They are now deceased.
Seven decades after the fact, the murder of Emmett Till is still considered a central catalyst for the civil rights movement. The author of a book devoted to the case had assured in 2017 that Carolyn Bryant had confessed to him that he had never been attacked by the boy.
The Department of Justice then reopened the file, but its investigators failed to determine whether she had invented her attack or not and the investigation was closed again in December 2021. Till was the subject of a feature film released in 2022.
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2023-04-27 21:20:00
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