NO. NEXT QUESTION? John McWhorter: Are Lynchings Really Happening?
Since 2024, to judge from news reports, there have been at least 10 Black people found hanged in public in the United States. Eight of these cases have been officially ruled suicides or are being treated as such given no signs of foul play. In neither of the other two has a white suspect been named. . . .
Lynchings, of course, once loomed as a real and grisly threat over Black communities — arbitrary killings, treated as a public spectacle for whites, and unpunished. And there are certainly cases in which police officers have claimed that someone in their custody died by suicide, but the circumstances strongly suggest that the individual was killed by the police.
But what Pressley and others are suggesting is different: that today, white people are hanging Black people for the purpose of terrorizing Black communities, and that local authorities are consistently overlooking it or covering it up.
In the cases Pressley’s letter cites, there is often good reason to think otherwise. Consider a few examples:
In 2024, Javion Magee, a 21-year-old Black truck driver, was found dead in North Carolina with a rope around his neck, dangling from a tree. There is surveillance video of Magee buying the rope.
In 2025, Demartravion Reed, a 21-year-old Black student at Delta State University in Mississippi, was discovered hanged from a tree on campus. Reed had sent his girlfriend suicidal text messages the night before.
In the case of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old woman who was found hanged from a tree in Mississippi last month, two people have now been arrested in connection with her death — but they are both Black men, which runs counter to the idea that these cases are reanimations of old-school racism.
But the left needs for lynchings to be happening, because they need it to be 1953. But despite their nostalgia for those days, it’s not. Instead we live in the Jussie Smollett Century.
