President Joe Biden has designated a national monument to honour Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched in 1955.
Till's death helped spark the nation's civil rights movement, in part because his mother held an open-casket funeral so the world could see the horrors that a racist-inspired murder had wrought on her son.
Mr Biden's national monument designation comes at a time when the US again grapples with its history of racism.
Who was Emmett Till?
Emmett was a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago. He was visiting relatives in rural Mississippi in the summer of 1955 when he was kidnapped, beaten and shot dead by racist vigilantes after being accused of flirting with Ms Donham in a grocery store.
He and some other local children had visited the store where Ms Donham, then 21, was working alone. She said at the time he had propositioned her and touched her on the arm, hand and waist.
Emmett's disfigured body was found a few days later in a river.
His murder in Mississippi helped ignite the civil rights movement, in part because his mother held an open-coffin funeral, with a photo of her son's mangled remains appearing in the press.
Ms Donham died on Tuesday, according to the Calcasieu Parish coroner's office. She was the last living person directly involved in the case.
What happened to Emmett's killers?
Emmett's death and an all-white jury's dismissal of charges against two white men who later confessed to his killing drew national attention to the atrocities and violence that African Americans faced in the US.
Ms Donham's then-husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, John W Milam, were charged in Emmett's murder and put on trial in 1955. The jury acquitted both men after Ms Donham gave evidence that Emmett had grabbed her waist and made sexual remarks at the store.
The men later confessed in a paid magazine interview that they had killed Emmett. Mr Bryant died in 1994 and Mr Milam died in 1981.
In 2021, the US Justice Department closed its reopened investigation into Ms Donham's role in the murder following the publication of a book whose author wrote that she told him she had lied about Emmett making sexual advances.
The department said it could not prove Ms Donham had ever made that confession — though it added that there was “considerable doubt as to the credibility of her version of events”.
In 2022, a grand jury in Mississippi declined to indict her for kidnapping or manslaughter. A few weeks before the grand jury's decision, a 1955 arrest warrant for Ms Donham on a charge of kidnapping Emmett, which had never been served, was located.
Christopher Benson, a journalist and lawyer who co-wrote a 2004 book about Emmett's murder with the boy's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, and continues to work with the family and others on the case, said it was regrettable nobody could ever be held accountable.
But he said that it is crucial for people to continue to seek to understand what the crime tells us about racial injustice in the US.
“The challenge to us in this contemporary moment is to step up and continue to derive meaning from this story in order to truly be engaged citizens and work for social justice,” Benson said.
Agencies contributed to this report
