Whoopi Goldberg wants the accuser of Emmet Till to “admit what she did” more than 60 years ago.

“I don’t want her in jail but I want her in front of a judge and jury,” the 66-year-old actress and co-host of “The View,” told Page Six at the recent New York Film Festival.

”I want her to admit what she did and what part she had,” she added. “And then, you know, for me, that would be perfect, instead of still trying to hide what she did away.”

The woman in question, Carolyn Bryant Donham, is widely believed to be the catalyst for the Aug. 28, 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmet Till after claiming the boy whistled at her in a Mississippi grocery store where she worked. Till had traveled from Chicago and was visiting relatives in the state at the time.

Earlier this year, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict the now-88-year-old woman who was 21 at the time of the lynching and was never charged or arrested in connection with the case. Her now-deceased husband, Roy Bryant, and brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, were both charged and acquitted of Till’s murder.

Donham has written an as-yet-unpublished memoir in which she maintains she tried to help Till after her husband and brother-in-law brought the boy to her so she could identify him on that fateful night.

“I did not wish Emmett any harm and could not stop harm from coming to him, since I didn’t know what was planned for him,” Donham argued in the manuscript written by her daughter-in-law. “I tried to protect him by telling Roy that ‘He’s not the one. That’s not him. Please take him home.’”

“I have always prayed that God would bless Emmett’s family. I am truly sorry for the pain his family was caused,” she said.

She also said she “always felt like a victim as well as Emmett” and “paid dearly with an altered life,” the New York Post reported in July.

That same month, a group of activists stormed a senior living home in Mississippi where they believed Donham resided following the alleged discovery of an unserved warrant for Carolyn Bryant Donham in the basement of a Mississippi courthouse. The group of “Emmett Till protestors,” including Black Panther activists, wanted Donham to pay for her perceived role in Till’s lynching.

“We on the move,” one activist could be heard saying in a Facebook Live stream of the event. “We don’t know how they’re hiding this white woman down here, they’re hiding Carolyn Bryant Donham. They’re calling the police, but we’re on the move. We know she’s in here.”

Donham’s daughter-in-law, Marsha Bryant, says that her in-law “had nothing to do with it.”

“They think she should die or go to jail forever,” she said. “They think what happened to Emmett Till should happen to her.”

One member told WRAL at the time, “I do understand that Ms. Bryant is in her mid-to-late-80s, but understandably, this is a crime she committed when she was 22. Sixty years later, it’s time for her to be held accountable.”

For her part, Goldberg is one of the producers of the new MGM movie, “Till” which focuses largely on the boy’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, and her struggle for justice in the aftermath of her son’s murder. Goldberg, who also stars in the film, spoke to an audience at the aforementioned film festival after the screening of “Till,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.

(Video: MGM/YouTube)

“Now you know what institutionalized racism looks like and you can connect it to your own life,” Goldberg told the crowd. “Maybe you’re a gay person. Maybe you’re a woman. Maybe you’re an Asian person. You all understand this hatred because it’s coming closer and closer. What we see on that screen is the culmination of what systematic racism looks like. It goes out in ripples and it touches everybody. And the whole point of all of this is we’ve seen it, we know. We saw George Floyd; we saw Trayvon Martin: children and young men, middle-aged men, men, people. This is your way of saying, I don’t like what I see up there and doing something about it.”

“People thought we should do some stories about black people, after all that went on over the last couple of years,” Goldberg said. “I always say, we got popular. We got back in vogue and people started saying maybe we should be doing more, we should be telling these stories and we got in through that and [MGM’s] Orion [division] said, ‘We should do this.’” Yes, thank you. Because we’ve been trying forever, just forever, to get it done. And people say, ‘No, it’s an important story and we really feel for it.’ And it’s like, ‘So you’re not going to give us any money for this?’”

“We were supposed to go to Venice and they then decided that it wasn’t the kind of film for their viewers,” Goldberg said. “And then it was, either Toronto or one of the film festivals in Canada, we were going to go there and that didn’t quite work for them either.”

Goldberg said she and other producers had been trying to get the film made for more than a decade, and they finally received sufficient financial backing after the death of career criminal George Floyd and the ensuing lawlessness and violence that wracked cities across the U.S. as a result.

“I would like to be more positive, but I think George Floyd had a lot to do with why this got made,” she said.

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Frank Webster

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Frank (Chip) Webster is a musician and composer, former teacher of percussion and U.S. Army Infantry veteran. He holds a degree in English from Arizona State University.

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