This editorial discusses racist violence and suicide.
My mother was in the yard, pulling the garden hose and watering flowers outside the modest family home where I grew up in rural Marion County. I ran to the ditch near the mailbox as the sound of chants grew louder: “No justice, no peace.”
As I peered down Taylor Road toward the property of a white neighbor who proudly flew a Confederate flag on a pole outside the home, I saw hundreds of people, most of them Black, marching up my narrow county road, carrying protest signs and multi-colored umbrellas to defend against the hot July sun. It was a sight never before seen in the rural, mixed-race community of Kokomo, Mississippi.
It was July 8, 2000. I was 10 years old and on summer break between fourth and fifth grade. Less than a month earlier, on June 16, one of my Black neighbors down the street, Jerry Johnson, had arrived home to a blood-freezing sight: As he pulled in the driveway, his headlights reflected on a white shirt suspended beneath a pecan tree in the front yard. His son, Raynard Johnson, was hanging from the tree by a belt.
The 17-year-old West Marion High School football player’s death sent shockwaves through the community and drew national attention, including from the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition. The marchers rejected the official finding that Johnson’s death was a suicide, considering Mississippi’s long, dark history of racist lynchings.
As the crowd drew closer, I saw the reverend leading the march. “Hey Ashton,” I heard a girl’s voice say. A little way behind him, I saw Whitney, one of my classmates at West Marion Elementary School, waving at me as she marched past; I waved back, smiling. It was the first time I’d seen a march or protest of any kind, and one of my classmates was right in the middle of it.
But even as Rev. Jackson insisted that “it’s not about Black or white” and that “it serves no useful purpose to reinforce a stereotype about Mississippi,” white state leaders and some in the media chastised the reverend and accused him of inflaming the situation.
“Let’s face it folks, without racial controversy, Jesse Jackson is out of business,” columnist Sid Salter wrote in an August 2000 piece syndicated in newspapers like The Vicksburg Post and The Clarksdale Press Register. “He makes his living talking about racial problems. He is a professional civil rights activist.”
Two autopsies determined that Johnson’s cause of death was suicide, with no visible marks of struggle or defensive wounds found on his body. In 2001, after reviewing the case, the U.S. Department of Justice declined to pursue it further, finding there was not enough evidence to open an investigation.
Yet out in Kokomo, to this day, quite a few Black folks and white folks will tell you they doubt the official rulings and still believe he was murdered. And knowing Mississippi’s history, I can’t blame them.
‘It Almost Never Fails’
I’ve been thinking a lot about Raynard Johnson’s death and the aftermath in the weeks since tragedy hit another Mississippi family with the death of Trey Reed. On Sept. 15, 2025, the 21-year-old Black Delta State University college student was found hanging in a tree on campus in Cleveland, Mississippi.
Of course, when anyone with even the slightest grasp of American history (including yours truly) hears about a young Black man found hanging in a tree in Mississippi, our brutal legacy of racist lynchings races to the front of mind. For good reason: At least 532 Black people were lynched here between 1882 and 1968. Few were ever prosecuted for the murders, even with clear evidence.
But as unverified rumors have swirled, our reporters at the Mississippi Free Press have been diligent to report the known facts without risking sensationalizing this tragedy and further complicating the pain and grief this family is enduring.
Even as the initial autopsy found that Reed’s death was a suicide, citing a lack of visible injuries that would suggest an attack, his family called for an independent autopsy. That independent autopsy is in progress after Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp’s Autopsy Initiative agreed to pay for a second autopsy.
Gov. Tate Reeves, who annually declares April as Confederate Heritage Month, has criticized those who continue to question the official ruling, calling it “a lot of speculation from people who have no facts or evidence” and saying in a Facebook post that it “doesn’t represent today’s Mississippi!”—an echo of the criticisms levvied at those who questioned the official story about Raynard Johnson’s death 25 years ago.
A Sept. 24, 2025, editorial in the Greenwood Commonwealth bemoans what it describes as a situation in which “the people in this state, in the nation and much of the media have been conditioned by Mississippi’s past” to see the worst in its present.
“It almost never fails,” the editorial begins. “When a Black person dies from hanging in Mississippi, there is an immediate rush to judgment by many that the person was murdered. This conclusion first is arrived at in the absence of evidence but then clung to even when the evidence says otherwise.”
‘Let the People See What They Did to My Boy’
But it’s important to understand why the ghosts of Mississippi’s past still haunt us. While lynchings aren’t the epidemic they once were in the Magnolia State, this remains a place that is still shaped by systemic racism and oppression in everything from food, to incarceration, to housing, to education, to voting access and representation, to policing and to health care access.
And quite frankly, Mississippi’s white leaders haven’t done nearly enough to reckon with our white supremacist past, nor its ongoing manifestations, to expect Black folks to live as if Jim Crow never was. It shows a deep denial of the effects of so much unprosecuted and ignored race violence toward people who are no more than a few generations removed from apartheid Mississippi to expect people not to fear the past when its vestiges are so ever-present.
So while we won’t speculate on the tragedy at Delta State University, we will keep asking questions. We will report on the knowable facts as they become available, but we will not dismiss the legacy of pain that informs the doubts that will surely linger, even if the second autopsy confirms Reed’s death was a suicide.
Another person marching past my house to support Raynard Johnson’s family on July 8, 2000, was a woman I didn’t know about then, but who had done more than I could’ve understood, at just a decade into life, to shape the America I grew up in: Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till.
Her 14-year-old son’s brutal lynching in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 over allegations that he had whistled at a white woman had helped propel the Civil Rights Movement nationwide—thanks in large part to Mamie Till-Mobley’s actions afterward to ensure the world knew what had been done to her child. At his funeral, she opened his casket to show the world his brutalized body—what state-supported white terrorism, regularly condoned in Mississippi and across America, looked like.
“Let the people see what they did to my boy,” she said.
And 45 years later, there she was, at age 78, marching for miles in the hot sun past me in front of my childhood home, bearing witness to the fact that our wicked past was nowhere near as understood, or far behind us, as some of us would like to think. It still isn’t.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.