Carolyn Bryant Donham, a White woman who accused a 14-year old Emmett Till of making advances toward her which eventually led to his gruesome racist killing  in Mississippi has died,  CNN reports. She was 88.

The Calcasieu Parish coroner’s office in Louisiana confirmed that Donham died on Tuesday. No cause of death was given.

In August 1955, Till was traveling from Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi. At a grocery store in the small town of Money, Donham, then known simply as Carolyn Bryant, claimed that Till whistled at her. Because of her allegations, Till was kidnapped, physically tortured, and slain by Donham’s then-husband, Roy Bryant, along with his half-brother J.W. Milam. Tills' body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River.

But Till’s death served as a catalyst to the Civil Rights movement. His mother, Mamie Till, despite her grief wanted society to understand the extremes that racist violence could go. At her son’s funeral, she insisted on an open casket so the world could see what had been done to him.

“Let the world see what I’ve seen,” she reportedly told a Chicago funeral director. The horrid images of Till’s mutilated body were published in JET Magazine, which ignited activists like Rosa Parks, who years later told Mamie Till she was thinking of the boy later that year when she defied a bus company in Montgomery, Ala., leading to a year-long boycott; and future-Rep. John Lewis, who was only a year older than Till, and realizing it could have been him.

“Emmett Till was my George Floyd…” he wrote in The New York Times, shortly before his passing in 2020.

Both Bryant and Milam were tried on murder charges but an all-White jury acquitted them of all charges. Being protected by the Double Jeopardy Clause in the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which “prohibits anyone from being prosecuted twice for substantially the same crime,” in a paid interview with Look magazine, Bryant and Milam confessed to the crime. Bryant died in 1994, Milam died in 1980,  both of cancer, according to reports.

Ever since Till’s brutal death, his descendants have vigorously sought justice on his behalf and have attempted to have Donham held accountable for his death.

In 2007, Donham admitted that she fabricated her testimony about Till making advances toward her.

“That part’s not true,” Bryant told Timothy Tyson, the author of The Blood of Emmet Till. Her admission would not be made public until 2017.

Although an unserved warrant dated Aug. 29, 1955, that charged Donham with Till’s kidnapping was discovered last year, a grand jury in Leflore County ruled that there was” insufficient evidence” to indict her on kidnapping and manslaughter charges after seven hours of testimony.

Till’s cousin, Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., spoke about the unimaginable suffering that the horrific crime has caused their family in a statement to CBS News.

"The prosecutor tried his best, and we appreciate his efforts, but he alone cannot undo hundreds of years of anti-Black systems that guaranteed those who killed Emmett Till would go unpunished, to this day," Parker’s statement read.

"The fact remains that the people who abducted, tortured, and murdered Emmett did so in plain sight, and our American justice system was and continues to be set up in such a way that they could not be brought to justice for their heinous crimes,” he continued.

Upon learning of Bryant's death, the  Emmett Till Interpretive Center, released a  statement to the media, which said in part:

"The woman whose lies in 1955 put the torture of Emmett in motion died today. She continued to uphold these lies and to protect the murderers until her death," the statement said. "While the world saw the horrors of racism, and the real consequences of hatred, what the world will never see is remorse or responsibility for Emmett’s death.

"The Emmett Till Interpretive Center notes the death of Carolyn Bryant Donham. We will continue working to educate people around the world about what Emmett Till’s life and Mrs. (Mamie Till)-Mobley’s work meant to racial healing and freedom."

Editor's Note: This story has been updated.