“Cases of Black people found hanged in the US South are a reminder of nation’s lynching history,” read an ABC News headline last month. That phrase – “lynching” – has been used again and again in reporting on the death of a woman in Mississippi. The Associated Press used the word, as did the British state broadcaster the BBC, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
You may think, with such a loaded phrase, that the suspects are members of the KKK. In fact, all three are black men, charged with the murder of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old woman found dead on August 3 in Jackson. Fortune’s own mother has said that she doesn’t believe the killing was motivated by race.
You would hardly know it from the media’s coverage. One BBC report on Fortune’s death cited Mississippi’s “dark history of racial violence and lynchings” and claimed the incident “left the [black] community concerned that racial violence in Mississippi could be on the rise again,” despite “the absence of concrete details about the case.” Her death, Newsweek reported, “sparked nationwide attention because the circumstances recalled Mississippi’s long history of racial terror lynchings.”
The BBC story quoted progressive Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett, Brandon King, a prominent civil rights activist, and Kenneth Stokes, a Mississippi Democrat, who all suggested there was a racial element to Fortune’s death. Another BBC story mentioned a letter sent by almost 60 US congressional Democrats demanding the FBI investigate “every hanging death of a Black individual across the United States.” Since the letter was sent, it has been established that Fortune’s body was hung up after she had died.
The letter was written by Ayanna Pressley, a member of the left-wing “Squad” in Congress, and claimed there had been “more than 70 modern-day lynchings in the United States between 2000 and 2025.” This is nonsense. The claim comes from a report written by Jill Collen Jefferson, a Mississippi race activist who said in 2021 that “lynchings never stopped… the evil bastards just stopped taking photographs.” Collen Jefferson acknowledges that the majority of the 70 cases she examined had officially been classified as suicides, murders without a racial motive or other hate crimes. Her report includes in its definition of “modern-day lynchings” the deaths of transgender, disabled and Native American people as well as killings that did not involve hanging at all.
Among the cases it cites is Bree Black, a transgender woman who was shot dead in Florida in 2020. The report admits that the murder remains unsolved, with no known suspect or motive. It also includes Skylar Heath, another transgender woman shot dead that year, again acknowledging that no motive was ever established.
Pressley’s letter claimed there had been “at least ten reported hangings of Black people” this year. The only source cited for the figure was a Washington Informer article that discusses eight deaths, several of which did not occur this year. In every case, authorities either ruled the death a suicide or said there was no evidence of foul play. The BBC originally reported these dozens of so-called “lynchings” uncritically, before later adding a clarification at the bottom of their article that “in most of those incidents, the deaths were officially ruled suicides.”
It is worth stating clearly that Fortune’s death is a tragedy. It is natural to feel outrage at such cruel treatment of another human being. But that does not entitle journalists and politicians to invent crimes that have not been committed. This is a moral panic, pushed by the race-obsessed wing of the Democratic party and credulous media outfits. Talk of lynching is an exercise in inventing racial violence where none has occurred. It is extremely irresponsible.
When George Floyd died in May 2020, America burned. It did so despite no racial motive being established in the criminal cases arising from his death. Of the four officers convicted of offenses relating to Floyd’s death, one was black, one was Asian and two were white. The Floyd riots became the costliest episode of civil unrest in US history, causing up to $2 billion in insured losses. Dozens of people died amid the turmoil. By implying that Fortune’s death was a racist killing, akin to that of Emmett Till in the 1950s, politicians and the media risk reigniting that violence.
Fortune’s death is a tragedy, but it does not entitle politicians to invent crimes that have not been committed
Some people seem desperate to create fictitious race crimes. A noose found in black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace’s garage in 2020 prompted an FBI hate crime investigation. It turned out the rope had been there months before Wallace was assigned the garage. The FBI concluded no crime had been committed. In 2019, actor Jussie Smollett claimed that two masked men attacked him in the night, shouting racist and homophobic slurs and declaring, “This is MAGA country,” before placing a rope around his neck. The supposed MAGA attackers turned out to be two black American brothers whom Smollett knew. The brothers said he had paid them to stage the attack.
Two years prior, five black cadet candidates at the US Air Force Academy Preparatory School found the words “go home n******” scrawled on whiteboards outside their rooms. The incident made US national news, with the academy’s superintendent assembling thousands of cadets and staff to denounce racism and telling racists to “get out.” There was just one problem: the racist was one of the supposed victims. The Air Force Academy later revealed that one of the black cadet candidates had written the messages himself.
The reporting on Fortune’s murder, and elected officials’ dubious claims about a spate of racist lynchings, is shameful. We have seen before that allegations of racist violence can create the conditions for real violence. Why would politicians and journalists seek to distort reality in such an irresponsible and dangerous way? Perhaps because the alternative conclusion is too difficult for them to accept: that America is no longer a racist country.
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