Westlake, Louisiana - Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white woman whose accusation resulted in the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till in 1955, has died at the age of 88.

Per CNN, Donham passed away on Tuesday in Westlake, Louisiana.

In 1955, Donham accused a 14-year-old Till of whistling at her at a store in Mississippi. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and half-brother, J.W. Milam, then kidnapped Till, brutally beat him, and shot him before throwing his body into a river.

The Till family never received justice for the tragedy.

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Bryant and Milam, both of whom have since passed away, were acquitted by an all-white jury before confessing to the crime in a 1956 interview.

In 2017, Professor Timothy Tyson claimed that Donham admitted to lying about Till making an advance on her, but she later denied recanting her statement, and a subsequent investigation was unable to prove she had confessed.

Five years later, Till's family called for her arrest after an unserved warrant was discovered. However, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Donham, despite the new evidence.

Till's murder, and his mother's decision to have an open-casket funeral to highlight the inhumanity of the crime, became a lightning rod for the Civil Rights movement for decades to come.

In 2022, President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law, the first legislation to make lynching a federal hate crime.