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.

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And now Congress is getting involved. Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, cited those 10 recent deaths in a letter this month that called for a federal investigation into all hanging deaths of Black people in the country. (She also cited a report of 70 “modern-day lynchings” between 2000 and 2025, though the report uses “lynching” broadly to encompass a wide range of deaths, most of which do not involve hanging.)

Pressley’s letter, which was signed by 58 other Democrats in Congress, argued that deaths by hanging “raise significant suspicion of foul play given the role of lynching in our nation’s history.” {snip}

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Death by hanging is sadly common, with it and other forms of asphyxiation representing about a quarter of the suicides in the United States. When a white person is found hanged, the usual assumption is that the death was a suicide. The question is whether we should think otherwise when the person is Black.

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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.

{snip} But in the face of the evidence we have so far, and given the incendiary nature of the claim, why would anyone say that the United States is experiencing a “national crisis” of lynchings?

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There is a larger lesson here. Instead of always looking backward to make sure that the most virulent racism of yesterday is truly extinct, Black Americans engaged in what we call “the struggle” should focus on the pressing issues of today and tomorrow.

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Of course, we want to acknowledge and thank the people who came before us, those who fought for the lives so many Black people now so comfortably lead. I understand the impulse to honor these predecessors by, as it were, cosplaying as them, battling again what they endured.

But I also suspect that those predecessors, looking at us now, would rather that we faced forward, not backward — just as they did.