![]() ![]() And that’s the thing that should scare them, because I never will.” Nick Naylor, 23 Jan. “They tried to cover this up, but I’ve never given up hope. “My son’s death marked the modern age of a fight that Black people have been in in Mississippi and this nation for centuries,” Johnson said. ![]() Raynard’s mother, Maria Johnson, says she is still waiting for some kind of justice. In February 2001, the Justice Department announced it ended its investigation into Johnson’s death: “The evidence does not support a federal criminal civil rights prosecution.” We will not rest until those who committed this murder are brought to justice,” Jackson told demonstrators before leading a march to the pecan tree where Raynard was found. “There’s enough circumstantial stuff here that warrants a serious investigation. Jesse Jackson traveled to Mississippi to call attention to Johnson’s hanging. But his family believes Johnson was lynched, Jefferson said. The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation called the hanging a suicide, according to records. Raynard Johnson was found hanging from a pecan tree in his front yard in Kokomo, Miss. The following are seven of those victims, plus Craig Anderson, who was fatally beaten in a racial terrorist attack that a federal judge called a lynching. ![]() trying to bring justice to grieving families. And the case is never heard from again unless someone brings it up.”Įach day, Jefferson works on that list of eight suspected hangings - including the 2018 hanging Willie Andrew Jones Jr. And then there is a formal ruling of suicide, despite evidence to the contrary. ![]() “When authorities arrive on the scene of a hanging, it’s treated as a suicide almost immediately. “There is a pattern to how these cases are investigated,” Jefferson said. The NAACP defines lynchings as “the public killing of an individual who has not received” due process under the law.ĭuring her investigation focusing intensely on Mississippi, Jefferson began seeing patterns in the deaths and connecting the dots in recent cases of Black people found hanging. Historians say lynchings often evoke the image of public hangings, however EJI and the NAACP expanded that definition to include any extrajudicial racial terror killing and mutilation committed to uphold racial segregation and a false premise of racial hierarchy. During that period, Mississippi recorded 581, the highest number of lynchings recorded by state. Crowds of White people often gathered in town squares or on courthouse lawns to watch Black people be lynched.įrom 1877 to 1950, more than 4,000 Black men, women and children were lynched in cities and towns across the country, according to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human rights organization based in Montgomery, Ala., which opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in 2018 to honor thousands of lynching victims. Historically, lynchings were often defined as fatal hangings by mobs, often acting with impunity and in an extrajudicial capacity to create racial terror. In each case she investigated, law enforcement officials ruled the deaths suicides, but the families said the victims had been lynched. In 2019, Jefferson began focusing her investigation on Mississippi. In 2017, Jefferson began compiling records of Black people found hanging or mutilated across the country. “Coming from Mississippi and seeing stuff intersect, talking about this stuff is like talking about what happened down the road,” said Jefferson, a Harvard Law School graduate who trained as a civil justice investigator with Bond. Jefferson was born in Jones County, Miss., which was an epicenter of the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during the civil rights movement. The evil bastards just stopped taking photographs and passing them around like baseball cards.” “But the thing is, lynchings never stopped in the United States. “The last recorded lynching in the United States was in 1981,” said Jill Collen Jefferson, a lawyer and founder of Julian, a civil rights organization named after the late civil rights leader Julian Bond. Since 2000, there have been at least eight suspected lynchings of Black men and teenagers in Mississippi, according to court records and police reports. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |