This week, police arrested a second man in connection to the death of 29-year-old Tasia Fortune, whose body was found hanging behind an abandoned house in Jackson, Mississippi, last month. An arrest warrant for a third suspect has also been issued.
Like Fortune, the two men who’ve been apprehended in her death are black. We need only mention this fact because reckless politicians, stoking paranoia and racial disharmony for partisan reasons, cynically used her murder to claim that the country was in the throes of a lynching epidemic.
Fifty-nine Democrats have signed a letter written by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) demanding the Trump administration investigate the “numerous incidents of Black people found hanging across the country.” Pressley maintains it’s a “national crisis” and “we CANNOT stand by while strange fruit hangs from trees across the country. We’re demanding a federal investigation NOW so we can stop modern-day lynchings.”
One of the signees, possible presidential hopeful Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, added that the administration must address these “widespread modern-day lynchings and put a stop to this racial terror.”
Big media joined the fray. The Associated Press notes that Fortune’s death “stirred distressing memories of the grim history of lynching across the U.S. South,” though reporters knew well that the hanging was a criminal act perpetrated by another black American.
Not only is there no lynching epidemic in the United States, but there likely hasn’t been anything approaching a lynching since James Byrd Jr. was murdered in 1998 in Jasper, Texas, by three white men. Two of his murderers, John King and Lawrence Brewer, were executed, and a third, Shawn Berry, was sentenced to life in prison.
The last incident of a lynching by hanging was Michael Donald, in March of 1981, 45 years ago, in Mobile, Alabama. Donald had been kidnapped by Ku Klux Klan members, beaten and strangled, and hanged from a tree. All three participants were caught. One of them was executed.
Pressley’s cynical campaign only belittles the deaths of Donald and Byrd, not to mention the thousands of others who had been victims of lynchings in our past.
All 10 hanging deaths cited by Pressley have been investigated. Eight of the cases have been ruled suicides by police departments. Of the two remaining incidents, one is still being investigated by a coroner’s office, and the other case is still open due to conflicting autopsies.
None of the deaths look anything like a lynching.
It is sadly the case that somewhere around a quarter of suicides in the U.S. involve hanging or suffocation, the second most common means of killing oneself. Though black Americans are less likely to hang themselves — or commit suicide, for that matter — than white Americans, over 900 died by self-hanging or suffocation last year. Over 10,000 white Americans hanged or suffocated themselves last year.
There is no evidence of a lynching epidemic. There is only the progressive’s unfalsifiable notion that white people are inherently disposed to racism. The “racial terror” accusation is a new front in the campaign to convince us that “systemic racism” exists.
But police are not “hunting young black men in the streets.” Virtually every one of the most infamous incidents of alleged or genuine police brutality against black Americans have no proven racial motivation. “Hands up, don’t shoot” never happened.
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There is no “Jim Crow 2.0” just because legislation proposes voters to show identification. Republicans are not banning schools from teaching about slavery just because they refuse to teach pseudohistorical texts like The 1619 Project.
And there is no spate of “modern-day lynchings.” There are just wildly irresponsible racemongers trying to gin up discord and anger before the midterm elections.