Carolyn Bryant, the white woman who claimed 14-year-old Emmett Till whistled at her, has confessed that she lied about the incident that ultimately lead to his lynching. The shocking revelation is made in the forthcoming book, "The Blood of Emmett Till." Via Vanity Fair: On a steamy hot September day in 1955, in a racially segregated courtroom in Sumner, Mississippi, two white men, J.W. Milam and his half-brother Roy Bryant-a country-store owner-were acquitted of the murder of a 14-year-old black Chicago boy. His name was Emmett Till. And in August of that year, while visiting a Deep South that he didn't understand, Till had entered a store to buy two cents worth of bubble gum. Shortly after exiting, he likely whistled at Bryant's 21-year-old wife, Carolyn. Enraged, Bryant and Milam took matters into their own hands. They would later admit to local authorities that they'd abducted Till three nights later. And when they finished with him, his body was so hideously disfigured from having been bludgeoned and shot that its horrifying depiction-in a photo in Jet magazine-would help to propel the American civil rights movement. On the stand, Carolyn had asserted that Till had grabbed her and verbally threatened her. She said that while she was unable to utter the "unprintable" word he had used (as one of the defense lawyers put it), "he said [he had]'"-done something – "with white women before.'" Then she added, "I was just scared to death." A version of her damning allegation was also made by

the defendant's lawyers to reporters. (The jury did not hear Carolyn's words because the judge had dismissed them from the courtroom while she spoke, ruling that her testimony was not relevant to the actual murder. But the court spectators heard her, and her testimony was put on the record because the defense wanted her words as evidence in a possible appeal in the event that the defendants were convicted.) Down through the decades, Carolyn Bryant Donham (she would divorce, then marry twice more) was a mystery woman. An attractive mother of two young boys, she had spent approximately one minute alone with Till before, in view of others, the alleged whistling had occurred. (He may not have whistled; he was said to have a lisp.) Carolyn then dropped out of sight, never speaking to the media about the incident. But she is hidden no more. In a new book, "The Blood of Emmett Till" (Simon & Schuster), Timothy Tyson, a Duke University senior research scholar, reveals that Carolyn-in 2007, at age 72-confessed that she had fabricated the most sensational part of her testimony. "That part's not true," she told Tyson, about her claim that Till had made verbal and physical advances on her. As for the rest of what happened that evening in the country store, she said she couldn't remember. (Carolyn is now 82, and her current whereabouts have been kept secret by her family.) Carolyn should be found, charged, and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.