by J. Pharoah Doss
On August 3, Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old Black mother of four, was found hanging from a tree in the backyard of an abandoned house in Jackson, Mississippi. Her body had been hanging for three or four days before it was discovered. At the time of this writing, the circumstances surrounding her death were still being investigated, and the authorities had not publicly determined whether her death resulted from homicide, suicide, accident, or another cause.
Since her body was discovered hanging in a state with a notorious history of racial violence perpetrated by Whites against Blacks, Elliot Connie, a psychotherapist and co-author of the book Change Your Questions, Change Your Future, ignored that Fortune’s cause of death was unknown and produced a video titled “We need to talk about Tasia Fortune, who was lynched.”
According to Connie, Fortune’s body hanging from a tree is not only disturbing but also a sign that America has regressed to a bygone era. He claimed that he learned in school that the last known lynching occurred in the 1950s, but he later discovered that lynchings have continued since then. He cited the 1998 James Byrd murder in Texas as an example. He further stated that individuals who claim racism no longer exists in America are continuing the problem.
Recognizing that there is a race problem, he went on, does not make America a bad country; rather, it helps to start the process of healing and growth.
Connie’s claim that a lynching occurred without evidence is irresponsible; furthermore, by using James Byrd Jr. as an example, Connie demonstrated he doesn’t know the difference between a hate crime and a lynching.
In 1998, three White males, Lawrence Brewer (31), John King (23), and Shawn Berry (23), gave a ride home to James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old Black man. Byrd knew Berry, the pickup truck driver, but he had no idea Brewer and King were avowed White supremacists. The White males chose to drive Byrd to a remote country road outside of town, where they severely beat him, chained him by his ankles to the pick-up truck, and drug him for three miles.
Byrd died midway through the dragging.
In Connie’s defense, the media referred to Byrd’s killing as a “lynching by dragging,” but state law enforcement was aware that Brewer and King were well-known White supremacists; thus, the murder was immediately classified as a hate crime.
Legally, a hate crime is a standard criminal offense, such as assault, arson, murder, or vandalism, that is committed with an added element of bias, motivated by the offender’s prejudice against the victim’s race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
In 2002, two sociologists, Jack McDevitt and Jack Levin, investigated hate crimes and identified four types of hate crime offenders.
1) Mission offenders: Individuals that commit hate crimes for ideological reasons.
2). Retaliatory offenders: Individuals who seek vengeance for a personal affront by targeting a member of the same group, even if the victim had nothing to do with it.
3). Defensive offenders: Individuals who commit hate crimes to protect their community.
4). Thrill seekers: This type is self-explanatory.
The sociologists discovered that thrill seeking accounted for 66 percent of hate crimes in the United States, but the men who murdered Byrd were mission offenders. They were eventually captured, tried, and convicted of murder. Brewer and King were sentenced to death, while Berry was given life in prison. Brewer was executed in 2011, while King was executed in 2019.
A lynching, on the other hand, can’t even be mistaken for a hate crime.
It’s when a mob takes the law into its own hands and publicly executes a suspected criminal, violator of social customs, or disrupter of political order. The lynch mob’s preferred method was hanging.
According to Black urban legend, these extrajudicial killings were named after Willie Lynch, a plantation owner from the British West Indies who lectured a Virginian audience in 1712 on how to control their Black slave population. Combined with the fact that Whites routinely lynched Blacks in the American South from the 1860s to the 1960s, it is clear how the urban legend arose, but it’s incorrect.
Historians believe that the term “lynching” entered the English language during the American Revolution. Militia colonel Charles Lynch often arrested anyone he suspected of being loyal to the British monarch, tried them in an informal court, flogged them, and took their property. Following the Revolutionary War, the term “lynching” referred to the illegal execution of traitors, criminals, or wrongly accused individuals.
Charles Seguin and David Rigby’s 2019 study, National Crimes: A New National Data Set of Lynching in the United States, 1883-1941, identified 4,467 lynching victims. 4,027 were males, 99 were females, and 341 were of undetermined gender. 3,265 were Black, 1,082 were White, 71 were Mexican, 38 were Native American, 10 were Chinese, and one was Japanese.
This raises the question of how many lynchings have occurred in the past fifty years.
According to official sources and accepted historical definitions, there have been no documented lynchings in the United States between 1976 and 2026. Modern racially motivated murders are classified as criminal homicides and hate crimes, not lynchings in the historical sense.
Connie stated that Tasia Fortune was lynched, and we need to talk about it because people who deny the existence of racism perpetuate the problem, but individuals who hear that a Black woman was found hanging from a tree, conclude she was lynched, and announce it on social media as a fact are purposely exacerbating the race problem in America.
