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Leonard Pitts: The octogenarian who lied Emmett Till to death is an icon of our failure

So says Carolyn Bryant Donham in historian Timothy B. Tyson's 2017 book, "The Blood of Emmett Till." You keep hoping for more, hoping to hear her wrestle with her crime, explain how she could have done what she did — and how she lives with herself now.

But in the end, the admission is all she gives, the only glimpse you get into how she views her role in one of history's signature atrocities, the brutal lynching of a 14-year-old Chicago boy who supposedly got fresh with her one fateful day in her family store in the nothing town of Money, Mississippi, and the acquittal of his killers, Donham's husband and his half-brother.