Emmett Till Lynching Update: White Woman Admits to Lying About Black Boy Flirting With Her

Most people know Emmett Till as the 14-year-old black boy who was murdered in Aug. 1955 by two white men, J.W. Milam and his half-brother Roy Bryant, because Bryant’s then-wife said the boy apparently flirted and made sexual advances toward her.

Now, Carolyn Bryant Donham (who has since been divorced and remarried twice more) has come clean and said she was lying, Vanity Fair reported Friday. In a new book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” author Timothy Tyson, a Duke University senior research scholar, revealed that in 2007, Donham, who was 72 at the time, told him that although she didn't recall all of the details that transpired the day Till came into Bryant’s store in Money Rd, Mississippi, some of the testimony she gave during the trial was fabricated.

When Tyson asked her about her claim that Till whistled and made verbal and physical advances towards her, she said, “That part’s not true.”

Till was visiting Mississippi from Chicago. More than 500 black people had been lynched in the state before Till's death. Most of the victims were accused of associating with white women.

Till was kidnapped, beaten and shot in August 1955 by the Donham’s husband and his half-brother four days after she made the then explosive claims. Bryant said his wife told him that Till said he’d “slept with white women before.”

As a result, Bryant and Miliam lynched the boy by Mississippi's Tallahatchie River, where his body was later discovered.

“Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” Donham said in Tyson’s book.

Despite the significant amount of evidence that Bryant and Miliam committed the act, they were acquitted by an all-white jury. The deliberation only took an hour.

Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, held an open-casket funeral, despite the gruesome image of her teen’s disfigured face.

Till's 1955 case was one of the instances that sparked the Civil Rights movement.

“The news of Emmett's death caused me...to participate in the cry for justice and equal rights,” Rosa Parks said.

Donham, now 82, disappeared and went into hiding in the years after the trial. Her whereabouts are reportedly unknown.

She claimed she “felt tender sorrow” for Till’s mother, who died on Jan. 6, 2003 at the age of 81.

Both Donham’s ex-husband and brother in-law are dead.