You really can’t remember?
For sure, something important happened years ago, something you should recall very easily, but time’s made things fuzzy. Have you forgotten or, worse yet, have you just remembered everything wrong? Usually, you suppose, it wouldn’t matter, but in the new book “The Blood of Emmett Till” by Timothy B. Tyson, it surely does.
For decades, Carolyn Bryant Donham didn’t talk about Emmett Till, her accusations or his murder in 1955. Stories about that day swirled over through the years, in court and out, depending on who was asked, but she kept mum until she read a book by Tyson, about a similar incident that happened 15 years after Till was killed.
She reached out to Tyson, he claims, ready to talk.
She’d written a biography, she said, and wanted it, and some other documents, to be archived appropriately. She denied remembering much, really, but it was during one of their interviews that Donham, at whom Till supposedly flirted, dropped a bombshell: she said Emmett never did what he was accused of doing.
He didn’t do it.
Contrary to popular notions, says Tyson, it’s unlikely that Till wasn’t aware of the dangers of interacting with White folks in 1955 Mississippi. Chicago, where Till grew up, was segregated, too, and he’d surely heard northward-migrating Mississippians talk about trouble. Fourteen years old and filled with adolescence, he knew the dangers, but he might have underestimated them.
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