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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAlways believe the victims
always...
For six decades, she has been the silent woman linked to one of the most notorious crimes in the nations 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.
The revelations were first reported on Friday by Vanity Fair.
As a matter of narrow justice, it makes little difference; true or not, her claims did not justify any serious penalty, much less death.
The two white men who were accused of murdering Emmett in 1955 and later admitted it in a Look Magazine interview were acquitted that year by an all-white, all-male jury, and so could not be retried.
They and others suspected of involvement in the killing died long ago.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/emmett-till-lynching-carolyn-bryant-donham.html
janterry
(4,429 posts)This case is a reminder of that: Carolyn Donham said she was a victim. I suppose when she made her claim, she deserved respect. But we must do what we can to investigate, too. In this case, a proper investigation would have revealed the real victim.
Jim Lane
(11,175 posts)Of course, if by "victims" you mean "people who actually were sexually abused", then it's tautologically true: Always believe the people who are telling the truth.
But we don't know the truth. "Always believe people who are alleging sexual abuse" just doesn't work. Just off the top of my head, consider Tawana Brawley, the accusers of the McMartin family, and, just in the last few days, dimwit O'Keefe's attempted sting operation against the Washington Post (planting a woman who falsely accused Roy Moore of impregnating her when she was 15, and hoping the paper would fall for it).
There are false accusations just as there are false denials.
In the case of Roy Moore, the evidence now available leads me to conclude that it's Moore who's lying. In the case of Trump, we have his own confession of what amounts to sexual assault (although IIRC there's an allegation of outright rape as to which the evidence is more in conflict but I haven't gotten into the sordid details).
Egnever
(21,506 posts)is it the accuser or the accused?