Emmett Till was murdered, August 28, 1955,for whistling at Carolyn Bryant, at Bryant's grocery store. Two white men confessed to the murder: Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant’s husband, and his half-brother JW Milam. Both men are dead, as are all other individuals directly linked to the events leading up to the killing. With one exception: Carolyn Bryant, and even she is understood to be in poor health. So what. 

For six decades, she has been the silent woman linked to one of the most notorious crimes in the nation’s history, the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, keeping her thoughts and memories to herself as millions of strangers idealized or vilified her.

But all these years later, a historian says that the woman has broken her silence, and acknowledged that the most incendiary parts of the story she and others told about Emmett — claims that seem tame today but were more than enough to get a black person killed in Jim Crow-era Mississippi — were false.

The woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, spoke to Timothy B. Tyson, a Duke University professor — possibly the only interview she has given to a historian or journalist since shortly after the episode — who has written a book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” to be published next week.

In it, he wrote that she said of her long-ago allegations that Emmett grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her, “that part is not true.”

She needs to be prosecuted at the very least for the murder of Emmett Till no matter her health. The Till family Deserves this justice. Carolyn Bryant's accusations caused the death of Emmett Till. She was able raise her two sons and live a full life, while taking that away from Mamie Till and her son Emmett Till. Justice needs to be served and she needs to be prosecuted.