Who is to be held accountable for Emmett Till's death, now that the witnesses are gone?

The last survivor of the historical horror widely known as “the lynching of Emmett Till” has died, leaving behind an infuriating amount of unanswered questions.

- Clarence Page

Carolyn Bryant Donham died in hospice care last week in Louisiana at age 88.

She is remembered by history mostly as the 21-year-old woman who accused Till--then a 15-year-old Chicagoan visiting his Mississippi relatives, of behavior that violated the old Jim Crow South’s irrational but strictly enforced racial etiquette — and it cost him his life.

In short, she accused the teen of sexually suggestive whistling, grabbing her by the waist, and asking her for a date.

Evidence indicates Donham later identified Till to her then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam. The two men then kidnapped the teen, tortured him, and shot him once in the head.

Not surprisingly for that time and place, an all-white jury acquitted the two white men in the killing, but the men later confessed in an interview with Look magazine the following year.

But the saga did not end there. After the lynching in Money, Mississippi, Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made his murder a rallying cry for the Civil Rights Movement, beginning with her brave decision to display her son, his face beaten beyond recognition, in an open casket to “let the world see what they did to my boy.”