Those statements dovetail with the testimony of Till’s uncle, Moses Wright, who said Milam told him, “If this is not the right boy, then we are going to bring him back. The man said he was tossed from the truck and lost his front teeth when he hit the ground.
The man quoted Donham as saying, “That’s not the n-! That’s not the one.” The second man was walking home from Money after buying molasses for his mother, only to be picked up by Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. She intervened and said it wasn’t him, and Bryant let him go. The first had been confronted by Bryant, who accused him of insulting Donham. Killinger said Donham’s claim in her memoir contradicts what she told him in 2005 - that Till said nothing when his kidnappers brought him to her.ĭuring his investigation, he took the statements of two Black men. “The idea that Till would essentially out himself in front of his kidnappers and would-be killers,” he said, “is beyond absurd.” The memoir, he said, contains “a whole lot of things that don’t have the ring of complete truth.”ĭavis Houck, co-author of “Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press,” said Donham’s claim sounds like it was ripped from William Bradford Huie’s lie-filled Look article, which depicted Till as fearless to the end. Michael Whelan, a psychologist who grew up in Sumner and walked past the 1955 Till trial on the way to school, said he can’t imagine a 14-year-old Black youth from Chicago being dragged off by rednecks in the middle of the night and being unafraid. After she denied Till was the one at the store, she claimed he “flashed me a strange smile and said, ‘Yes, it was me,’ or something to that effect. That is far different from her memoir, “I Am More Than a Wolf Whistle,” which portrays Till as fearless and her as frightened. Roy asked if that was the same one, and I told him it was not the one who had insulted me.”
In that original statement, Donham - then Carolyn Bryant - said when her husband, Roy Bryant, brought Till to her, he “was scared but hadn’t been harmed. But through a source, MCIR has obtained a copy of that single-spaced 109-page memoir, which contradicts her original statement to her husband’s defense lawyer, Sidney Carlton. AP Photo/Associated Pressĭonham’s memoir remains sealed in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until 2036. FILE - An undated portrait of Emmett Louis Till, a Black 14-year-old Chicago boy, whose weighted down body was found in the Tallahatchie River near the Delta community of Money, Mississippi, Aug.
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