Greene County Democrat

Tag: dies at 88

  • Newswire : Carolyn Bryant Donham, Emmett Till’s false accuser, dies at 88

    Emmett Till and Carolyn B. Donham

    By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent

    The white woman who testified that a Black teenager named Emmett Till had made inappropriate approaches toward her, which led to his lynching and murder in Mississippi in 1955, has died.
According to a coroner’s report, Carolyn Bryant Donham, 88, died while receiving hospice care in Louisiana.
A death record issued on Thursday, April 27, in the Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office noted that Donham died in Westlake, Louisiana, two nights earlier.
Donham’s false claims against Emmett Till set off a chain of events that sparked the modern civil rights movement.
After the teen’s mother insisted his casket remain open during the funeral and photos of Till’s battered and mutilated body appeared in Jet Magazine, the world received a birds-eye view of the brutality of America’s rampant racism.
In August 1955, Till traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to spend time with relatives.
Donham, then 21 years old and going by the name Carolyn Bryant, accused Till of making inappropriate approaches toward her while she worked at a grocery shop in the small town of Money, Mississippi.
According to the Reverend Wheeler Parker, a cousin of Till who was present at the time, the 14-year-old Till whistled at the woman, which was an act that violated the racist social standards that were prevalent in Mississippi.
Evidence suggested a lady identified Emmett Till to Donham’s then-husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, who were responsible for Till’s murder.
An all-white jury acquitted the two white suspects, but the men later confessed their guilt in an interview with Look magazine.
In 2022, the Associated Press secured a copy of Donham’s unpublished memoir, in which she claimed that she had no idea what would become of Till.
The outlet noted that the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting was the first organization to reveal the contents of the 99-page book titled “I am More Than A Wolf Whistle.”
Author and historian Timothy Tyson of Durham, North Carolina, gave reporters a copy of the book. Tyson claimed he received a copy from Donham in 2008 while interviewing her, the Associated Press reported.
Though Tyson claimed to have provided the FBI with the text, the agency ended its lengthy investigation into Donham in 2021. The book was deposited in an archive at the University of North Carolina with the promise that it would only be made public at a later time.
Tyson stated that he decided to make it public after individuals performing research at the Leflore County courthouse in Mississippi in June 2022 discovered an arrest warrant on abduction charges that were issued for “Mrs. Roy Bryant” in 1955 but were never served or executed.
In March 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act of 2022, making lynching a federal hate crime. Earlier, the bipartisan measure passed both chambers of Congress.
The legislation received pushback from three Republicans – Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Chip Roy of Texas. Each was the lone vote against the bill.
“I could not have been prouder to stand behind President Biden as he signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act into law,” National Urban League President Marc Morial stated.
“The act of lynching is a weapon of racial terror that has been used for decades, and our communities are still impacted by these hate crimes to this day,” Morial continued.
“This bill is long overdue, and I applaud President Biden and Members of Congress for their leadership in honoring Emmett Till and other lynching victims by passing this significant piece of legislation.”
According to the bill’s text, “Whoever conspires to commit any offense… shall (A) if death results from the offense, be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.” “(B) In any other case, be subjected to the same penalties as the penalties prescribed for the offense of the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.”
Specifically, the legislation makes lynching a federal hate crime, punishable by up to life in prison.
The measure had faced defeat for over 100 years, with lawmakers attempting to pass the legislation more than 200 times. The House finally passed the bill on a 422-3 vote. It passed unanimously in the Senate.

  • Newswire : Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, Civil Rights Icon, Chief of Staff to Dr. King, dies at 88

    dr. wyatt t. walker 2.png

    Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker speaks at Virginia Union University’s annual Community
    Leaders Breakfast in Richmond in January 2008.
    Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Richmond Free Press
    (TriceEdneyWire.com) – Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker Jr. did all he could to advance civil rights during his long life. He is credited with being the key strategist behind many of the civil rights protests that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led in seeking to end the racial injustice of Jim Crow in the 1960s.
    During his four years as Dr. King’s chief of staff, he helped raise the money for and orchestrate major civil rights protests. Dr. Walker came to Dr. King’s attention after leading protests against segregation in Petersburg that resulted in his repeated arrests. At the time, he was pastor of Petersburg’s Gillfield Baptist Church, which he led for seven years.
    On New Year’s Day in 1959, he led a “Pilgrimage of Prayer” in Richmond against school segregation. Dr. Walker’s contributions to justice and freedom in America are being remembered following his death Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018, in Chester, near Petersburg, where he lived for the last 14 years. He was 88.
    Funeral arrangements were incomplete at Free Press deadline on Wednesday. The Rev. Al Sharpton, a family friend, announced the death of Dr. Walker, who also was the first board chairman of Rev. Sharpton’s National Action Network.
    “A true giant and irreplaceable leader,” Rev. Sharpton stated in releasing the information on Dr. Walker’s death on Twitter. “A huge tree has fallen.”
    “America has lost a great civil rights leader,” said Henry L. Marsh III, a retired civil rights attorney who served as Richmond, Va.’s first African-American mayor and later as a state senator. “He was a Virginia civil rights leader who earned a place on the national stage. The world is a better place because of his presence,” said Mr. Marsh, who was deeply engaged in attacking segregation and racial injustice in the courts.
    Dr. Walker spoke against bigotry and racial oppression from pulpits in Petersburg, Atlanta, New York City and on five continents. He also was a leading voice in protesting apartheid in South Africa and was part of the team that helped supervise South Africa’s first free elections in 1994 when the late Nelson Mandela was elected that country’s president.
    He also advocated for affordable housing and better schools in New York during his 37 years as the pastor of Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem. The grandson of a former slave, Dr. Walker was born just before the start of the Great Depression on Aug. 16, 1929, in Brockton, Mass. He was the 10th of 11 children of the Rev. John Wise Walker and Maude Pinn Walker. His father read both Greek and Hebrew and was a member of the 1899 graduating class of Virginia Union University. His mother also was a VUU graduate.
    Although the family had little money after his father became pastor of a church in New Jersey where he grew up, Dr. Walker said his father instilled in him his passion for fighting racial injustice. “My father was what we called a ‘race man,’” Dr. Walker said. “He reacted to anything that smacked of racial injustice or prejudice. I was under that influence growing up. He was my first hero.”
    Dr. Walker came to Richmond after World War II to start his studies at VUU. A standout student who went on to earn his undergraduate and ministry degrees at the university, he began his civil rights work while a student. Refusing to accept second class status, he often was put off Richmond street cars for refusing to move to the back. After being called to the Gillfield Baptist Church pulpit in 1953, he preached, protested and courted arrest.
    The first of his 17 arrests came when he led a group of African-Americans through the whites-only door of the Petersburg Public Library, one of his many acts of civil disobedience. He also served as president of the Petersburg Branch NAACP, state director of the Congress of Racial Equality and founder of the Petersburg Improvement Association, which was modeled on the Montgomery Improvement Association that guided the bus boycott in 1956 in that Alabama city.In 1960, Dr. Walker went to Atlanta to join Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference as its executive director after previously serving on the board.
    He had met Dr. King when both were presidents of their seminary classes, he at VUU and Dr. King at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where Dr. Walker later would earn his doctorate. Through 1964, Dr. Walker served as the SCLC executive director and Dr. King’s right-hand man. Dr. Walker raised money to support the SCLC and also devised boycotts and demonstrations for Dr. King, most notably in the spring of 1963 in Birmingham, Ala., under the code name “Project C.” The C stood for “confrontation,” Dr. Walker recalled in an interview.
    “The federal government was against us, the local communities were against us, the judges were against us, but we managed to do it, and I guess we found the strength to do it because it was a moral fight,” he told an interviewer in 2006. “I was fully committed to nonviolence, and I believe with all my heart that for the Civil Rights Movement to prove itself, its nonviolent actions had to work in Birmingham,” he said.
    “If it wasn’t for Birmingham, there wouldn’t have been a Selma march, there wouldn’t have been a 1965 civil rights bill. Birmingham was the birthplace and affirmation of the nonviolent movement in America.”
    Dr. Walker played a key role in circulating Dr. King’s famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” penned in April 1963, that argued for civil disobedience as a legitimate response to racial segregation. Dr. Walker also helped organize the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was capped by Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
    Historians and those who worked with Dr. King argue that Dr. Walker’s management skills enabled the SCLC to grow from a largely volunteer organization into a crucial, professional element of the Civil Rights Movement, with a $1 million annual budget and 100 full-time workers. Dr. Walker’s “brilliance as a strategist was his greatest contribution to the Civil Rights Movement,” according to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who also worked with Dr. King and went on to found and lead the national Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
    He knew how to harness the energies of people who were excited about social change and how to use the church as the center of his advocacy for the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed,” Rev. Jackson said. Dr. Walker left the SCLC in 1964 to become pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and to work with the Negro Heritage Library.
    In 1966, he became president of the organization whose goal was publishing works of African-Americans and pushing for inclusion in textbooks information on the role of African-Americans in U.S. history. In 1966, at Dr. King’s recommendation, he became interim pastor of Canaan Baptist Church, a post he held until a series of strokes forced him to retire in 2004.
    Dr. Walker led the church in developing housing units with reduced rents, retail stores and apartments and a service center for elderly people. He also fought to remove drug dealers from streets around the church, and when he thought police were ignoring the problem, he took action.
    For example, in April 1970, Dr. Walker preached a Sunday sermon through a bullhorn outside the Teen City pizza parlor that was notorious for drug trafficking. “We are trying to save our children,” he said, before turning his bullhorn toward tenements across the street.
    “You, up there in the windows,” he said, “tell your kids to keep out of Teen City.”
    At one point, the Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas “put a hit out on me,” Dr. Walker recalled, “because I was effectively thwarting the drug traffic.”
    He said he ignored warnings that his work against illicit narcotic sales was too dangerous. “I had been involved in the struggle in the Deep South, so I was accustomed to dangerous situations,” he said. “It was tough to frighten me because I was so convinced that God would take care of me.”
    Dr. Walker also was considered an authority on sacred music. Along with composing religious music, Dr. Walker also was the author of 10 books and articles dealing with the ties between music, religious traditions and social change. He also was noted for his photography and for founding Harlem’s first charter school in 1999.
    Dr. Walker chaired the boards of Freedom National Bank until it collapsed in 1990 under the weight of risky loans and of the Consortium for Central Harlem Development, which Canaan Baptist stated was responsible for $100 million in housing. In the years since his retirement, the aging and frail Dr. Walker, who needed a wheelchair to move around, received numerous invitations to speak. He used his speeches to continue to encourage activism on the racial justice front and was outspoken in support of Black Lives Matter.
    In a speech a few years ago during the holiday for Dr. King, he expressed his concern that the legislative victories of the 1960s at the height of the movement — including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — “seduced us into becoming too comfortable.”
    “It is insufficient for us to come together on (Dr. King’s) birthday, sometimes in an artificial way, White and Black together, and sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and hold hands and get a warm feeling and then go back to business as usual in White racist America,” he said.
    Survivors include his wife of 68 years, Theresa Edwards Walker; a daughter, Patrice W. Powell; three sons, Robert, Earl and Wyatt Tee Walker Jr.; his sister, Mary Holley; and two grandchildren.