The woman who accused Emmett Till of suggestively whistling at her, leading to the teenager’s kidnapping and slaying, wrote an unpublished memoir in which she claims she didn’t want him killed, the Associated Press reports.
The AP was given a copy of I Am More Than a Wolf Whistle, a 99-page manuscript written by Carolyn Bryant Donham, the White woman who claimed that Till, who was Black, flirted with her at a Money, Mississippi, grocery store in 1955.
Days after the alleged incident, Donham’s husband, Roy Bryant, and brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, kidnapped, tortured, and killed the 14-year-old Till. The two were acquitted of murder but later admitted to the slaying.
Donham writes in the manuscript, “I did not wish Emmett any harm and could not stop harm from coming to him, since I didn’t know what was planned for him. I tried to protect him by telling Roy that ‘He’s not the one. That’s not him. Please take him home.’”
The manuscript was provided to the AP by historian Timothy Tyson, who received it from Donham while he was interviewing her in 2008. (Tyson’s book on the case, The Blood of Emmett Till, was published in 2017.) Earlier this month, the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation discovered an unserved arrest warrant for Donham from shortly after Till’s slaying; the attorney general of Mississippi recently said that she does not plan to prosecute Donham in the case.
In her manuscript, Donham claims that she “always felt like a victim” in the case.
“I have always prayed that God would bless Emmett’s family,” she writes. “I am truly sorry for the pain his family was caused.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
