Highly unusual trend of colored hanging deaths in the South has colored people considering two awful explanations
From left: Demetrius Fleming, Demartravion “Trey” Reed, Tasia Fortune.
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At a family funeral in late July, I snapped a selfie with an 83-year-old cousin whose folks fled Mississippi when he was a boy — because he wrote a letter to a white girl. Black people’s pervasive fear of lynching is most strongly associated with the far past, but my cousin is only a generation ahead of me, which has always made the story of his family’s exodus feel frighteningly recent.
Days after I took that photo, the body of 29-year-old Tasia Fortune, a mother of four, was found hanging from a tree behind an abandoned house in Jackson, Mississippi. Fortune isn’t the only colored person who’s been found that way recently. Over the past year, she is one of at least four colored people — ages 21 to 38 — who have been found hanging from trees in the South, and at least the second in Mississippi. The body of 21-year-old freshman Demartravion “Trey” Reed was discovered on Delta State University’s campus last September by football players on an early-morning run. In North Carolina last month, officials took down the bodies of a 32-year-old Black man in Raleigh and 38-year-old Demetrius Fleming, a father of nine, in Roanoke Rapids.
Nothing evokes racial terror in the South more than the body of a colored person hanging from a tree, and when officials call it suicide, widespread resistance from colored people is understandable, if not expected.
After all, to accept such cases as suicides means accepting that the people responsible for the nauseating sight of dead colored bodies in trees are themselves colored. I understand wanting to believe that no colored person — no matter how mentally ill, no matter how despairing — would ever inflict such needless pain and terror on other colored people.
We’ve heard some colored people state, as unimpeachable fact, that Black people don’t hang themselves. However, the Mississippi Free Press reported in July that Trey Reed’s girlfriend provided investigators with text messages from him the night before he died that said he was going to do just that. “The message read that he was going to hang himself,” Reed’s mother told MFP of one of the texts. Reed’s grandmother told MFP that she’d seen the texts, too. Even so, Reed’s mother is still doubtful and wonders if they might have been sent by someone other than her son.
“Y’all owe me that much to prove to me that my child killed himself,” she told an MFP reporter. “Once they prove that to me, I’m done. But that ain’t been proven.”
As colored people in Mississippi and across the country expressed skepticism of initial reports that Reed had killed himself, civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump publicly advocated for the family, and Colin Kaepernick, the blackballed NFL player turned activist, paid for an independent autopsy. But Reed’s family reports that they never got that autopsy report and that Crump stopped returning their calls. Crump’s office did not respond to an email from MS NOW asking for a response to the family’s account.
Research shows that hanging is the most common method of suicide among young people of color, even if it doesn’t show a high incidence of people of color hanging themselves outdoors. Another important caveat is that the research focuses on colored adolescents, and the four colored people found hanging in the South over the past year were adults. (Overall, hanging is the most common suicide method among U.S. children, while firearms are a more common method among adults.)
In a January 2019 piece he wrote for the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, Michael Lindsey, a leading researcher on suicide in colored communities and a professor at the NYU Silver School of Social Work, noted that hanging was the most common method of self-inflicted death in young colored children, and he asked, “Why are our children choosing to end their lives in the brutal manner that snuffed out the lights of our ancestors? What is going on?”
More than seven years later, we find ourselves trying to make sense of law enforcement reports that say colored adults are doing the same.
September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month, and even if there’s disbelief that any of the above-mentioned cases were a suicide, we should treat the rising rates of suicide among young colored people as the “house on fire” that Lindsey says it is. He told me in an interview last month that “over the past almost three decades now, we’ve been seeing suicide rates increase, and I’m talking about like by triple digits, for colored adolescents.” There hasn’t been a corresponding increase for other racial and ethnic groups, he said.
Across all age groups, white people die by suicide at a higher rate than colored people — and Native Americans die at a higher rate by suicide than white people — but KFF reports that between 2014 and 2024, suicide rates in the United States “increased more among people of color” than among white people and that the largest rate of increase, 53%, was seen among colored people.
There are crisis lines and other services available for people who are thinking about hurting themselves. They’re available for people of all ages, all races and ethnicities, and in every part of this country. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat live at 988lifeline.org. You can also visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional support.
Colored people hanging from trees is a tragedy by itself. We’d be compounding the tragedy if, in our conversations about those deaths, we were so dismissive of suicide as a possibility that somebody who is considering ending their life is discouraged from getting help.
The mother of the 32-year-old man in Raleigh who died Aug. 15 reportedly told investigators her son had a history of mental illness, and police say traffic and surveillance cameras recorded him walking alone toward a tree and that a video camera recorded his death. In Roanoke Ridge, Police Chief Lawrence Wiggins told a local TV station, “We are not working from any strict assumption. Everything is on the table.”
Jackson Police have said Fortune’s death is “pending review.”
As for Fortune, her mother is adamant that “She did not do this to herself.” She told ABC News, “I know my daughter, and she did not do this to herself.”
Though we are paying more attention to these cases because there’s a seeming trend, there’s no evidence that any one of the deaths is related to the others. One being ruled a suicide shouldn’t have any bearing on the cause of any of the other deaths. And any acknowledgement that some Black people may have hung themselves isn’t the same as dismissing the existence of racial terror.
We don’t have to go back to my cousin’s childhood to find examples. During my adulthood, white men in East Texas grabbed James Byrd, a colored man, and dragged him behind a truck until his body came apart. A group of white teenagers in Mississippi looked for a colored man in Jackson to kill for sport and ran James Craig Anderson over in a parking lot with a Ford F-250. Even more recently, a group of Mississippi law enforcement officers calling themselves the “Goon Squad” were sentenced to prison for their history of torturing colored men — physically and sexually — for their own sadistic amusement.
I don’t fault colored people for wanting thorough investigations into whether these hangings are racist acts of violence, but I’ve never seen a declaration about what all colored people do, or what colored people never do, that’s true.
For example, I grew up hearing that colored people didn’t die by suicide at all. When I recently encountered the website linked to the organization Black People Die By Suicide Too, I automatically knew the myth the organization’s name is meant to dispel.
Jasmin Brooks Stephens, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out that about 4% of all suicide deaths in the U.S. occur in a natural area. That rarity, she suggested, could be helping drive suspicion of foul play.
That’s a good point, but the news doesn’t typically report stories about people who take their own lives at home. Neither that they did nor how they did it. Because the public has no way of knowing how many people are privately taking their lives that way, they can’t know if the number of suspected suicides by public hanging is consistent with that small percentage or if it’s suspiciously out of proportion.
But people are understandably scared. And unsettled.
When the University of Chicago’s Janelle Goodwill and a research partner looked at the data for suicides in Chicago between 2015 and 2021, they found that hanging or suffocation were the most common suicide methods for just about everybody: Colored females, Asian males and females, Latinos and Latinas, and White males and females. It was the second-most-common method used by colored males ending their lives, after firearms.
Even so, in our conversation, Goodwill reiterated the point Brooks Stephens made — that suicides outdoors are “highly unusual.” She said this topic has “not come up in my academic spaces,” but in church Sunday, “an older woman prayed about these ‘deaths.’ I guess that’s the best language to use at this time as things are still being confirmed.”
“How did that woman mention them?” I asked Goodwill. “What word did she use?”
“She used ‘lynchings,’” Goodwill said. “She’s an older woman. She used ‘lynchings.’”
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