When I first read that 29-year-old Tasia Fortune had been found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home in Jackson, Mississippi, I stopped. The Mississippi Free Press reported that Fortune was found on Aug. 3, and the Hinds County Coroner’s Office identified her days later.
As of Sept. 11, her death has been ruled a homicide and law enforcement has arrested one man in connection with her death—Jarques Ratliff, who has pleaded not guilty.
I did not know Tasia, and I am not going to pretend I know how she died. Her mother has publicly said she does not believe her daughter took her own life. Tasia was a mother of four, and somewhere beyond all the headlines and social-media posts are children and a family waiting for answers. They deserve facts, not speculation.
But when I saw those words—Black woman, Mississippi, hanging from a tree—I thought about my grandmother.
Growing up in Mississippi, my grandmother would sit me down and tell me what Black people had endured. She told me about people being hanged from trees and about the fear Black families carried. She taught me why the Confederate battle emblem on Mississippi’s old state flag meant something very different to many Black people than it did to those who called it heritage. I did not first learn this history from a college classroom. I learned it sitting with my grandmother.
Those conversations shaped me. They are part of why I spent years advocating for Mississippi to change its state flag. For me, that fight was never simply about a piece of cloth. I could not separate that symbol from the history my grandmother had placed in my hands.
She was also the person who taught me about Emmett Till. I knew the story of the 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who came to Mississippi in 1955 and never made it home alive. I knew that an all-white jury acquitted Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the two men who later admitted to killing Till in a magazine interview. I knew what Mamie Till-Mobley did when she refused to allow America to look away from what had been done to her son. The Justice Department’s historical record confirms the basic facts of the case and the decades-long attempts to determine whether anyone else could be held accountable.
Years later, when historian Timothy Tyson reported that Carolyn Bryant Donham had recanted part of the account attributed to her, I joined calls demanding that authorities take another look at the case. The Justice Department did exactly that and ultimately concluded that Tyson’s reported recantation could not be independently corroborated. Donham denied making it. That distinction matters to me because if we are going to demand truth from institutions, we also have to be committed to telling the truth ourselves.
My grandmother had taught me too much about Mississippi to look away.
That is what I think people sometimes misunderstand about Black memory in this state. Some of us learned Mississippi history sitting beside our grandmothers and listening to elders around kitchen tables, in churches and at family gatherings. They told us what happened, where it happened, and sometimes whom it happened to. Those stories became part of how we understood the place we called home.
And history confirms why those memories run so deep.
Medgar Evers was shot in the back outside his Jackson home in 1963 after returning from an NAACP meeting. The following year, civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Neshoba County during Freedom Summer. Their killings became one of the most infamous cases of racial violence during the Civil Rights Movement.
Black women were victims of that terror, too. In 1915, a Black Mississippi woman named Cordelia Stevenson was taken from her home by a white mob near Columbus, raped and lynched. Her body was left hanging near railroad tracks for two days, visible to people passing through the area. No one was ever held responsible. The Equal Justice Initiative says Stevenson was one of at least 656 Black people killed in racial-terror lynchings in Mississippi between 1877 and 1950.
More than a century later, I read that another Black woman had been found hanging from a tree in Mississippi.
That history does not tell us how Tasia Fortune died. I want to make that distinction as clearly as I can. I am not calling Fortune’s death a lynching because the evidence available to the public does not establish that. I am also not going to declare what happened before the medical examiner and investigators complete their work.
What I am saying is that Black Mississippians have every right to ask questions.
Asking those questions is not a conspiracy. It is memory, and there is a difference. Black distrust of institutions did not appear overnight. It grew over generations in a state where racial violence was sometimes ignored, inadequately investigated, or never punished. That history does not prove what happened to Fortune, but it absolutely explains why so many people want transparency now.
That is why I believe we should give investigators the space to follow the evidence wherever it leads while demanding that the process be thorough and transparent. Fortune’s family deserves answers. The public deserves facts. If the evidence shows that another person was responsible for her death, there must be accountability. If the evidence shows something else, we have to be willing to accept what the evidence establishes.
Trust cannot simply be demanded. Trust has to be earned.
I love Mississippi. It raised me, shaped me, and gave me my voice. No matter where life takes me, Mississippi will always be home. But loving Mississippi has never required me to lie about Mississippi. Loving home means being willing to tell the truth about it, including the parts of our history that still hurt. Our state has changed in many ways, and that progress matters. But progress does not require amnesia.
I still hear my grandmother when stories like this come across my screen. I remember what she taught me about Mississippi, those trees, Emmett Till, and the people whose names never made it into the history books I was handed as a child. Those memories do not tell me how Tasia Fortune died. They tell me why we should care enough to find out.
Tasia Fortune’s family deserves answers. Mississippi deserves the truth. And until the evidence gives us those answers, asking questions is not something Black Mississippians should ever apologize for.
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.
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