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Mississippi, Goddam

Writer: nkozia
nkozia
22 minutes ago
28 min read

Lynchings, Necropolitics, and the Persistence of American Moral Decay


Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Ephesians 6:12-13

I. The Land and the Dead


Mississippi is a state where the soil itself is a palimpsest of Black death. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has documented hundreds of racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Mississippi between 1877 and 1950, with counties like Leflore (48 documented victims), Carroll (29), Kemper (24), Hinds (22), and Lowndes (20) bearing the densest concentrations of documented killings ([EJI, Lynching in America, 2020]. A 2015 analysis of EJI data found that Mississippi ranked second among all states in lynchings per capita ([Mississippi Free Press, 2015]. The NAACP recorded at least 581 lynchings in Mississippi between 1882 and 1968, using a different methodology and date range ([The Marshall Project, 2025]. I would speculate those numbers are much greater than reported.


Mississippi is an institutional architecture that makes Black death in America legible as accident, suicide, or anomaly, and never as the structural pattern it so clearly presents. The cases below are recent. They span 2011 to 2026. They involve sheriffs who declared "no foul play" before autopsies were complete, coroners who ruled suicide within hours, prosecutors who deferred to grand juries that have not convened, and a federal government that, despite passing the Emmett Till Antilynching Act in March 2022, made lynching a federal hate crime for the first time in 120 years of legislative attempts, which has not publicly resulted in a federal lynching charge under the Act in any of the cases reviewed here [NPR, 2022]; [Congress.gov].


II. The Cases County-by-County


Smith County: Rasheem Carter (2022)

Rasheem Carter was twenty-five years old, a welder from Fayette, Mississippi, saving money to reopen a seafood restaurant he had named after his seven-year-old daughter, Cali. In October 2022, he was working a short-term contracting job in Taylorsville, in Smith County, approximately one hundred miles from his home. On October 2, Carter called his mother, Tiffany Carter, frantically. He told her that a group of white men in three pickup trucks were pursuing him and shouting racial slurs ([Washington Post, 2023]; [NBC News, 2023]. That was the last time his family heard from him.


On November 2, 2022, a month after he disappeared, authorities found Carter's remains scattered in a wooded area south of Taylorsville. Family attorneys stated that Carter's head had been severed from his body, with other remains found in different locations. Authorities suggested that animal activity may have affected the remains. Additional remains were recovered over the following months, including a third set confirmed by the Mississippi Crime Laboratory as Carter's and a fourth set that the Smith County District Attorney identified as animal bones ([ABC News, 2023]; [ABC7, 2023]; [Washington Post, 2023].


The Smith County Sheriff's Office posted on Facebook the day after the remains were discovered:

"At this time, we have no reason to believe foul play was involved, but the case is still under investigation" [Mississippi Free Press, 2023].

Sheriff Joel Houston later told NBC News, after public backlash, that he had "not ruled out the possibility of murder" but his department's initial declaration of "no reason to suspect foul play" had already shaped the public narrative and the trajectory of the investigation ([NBC News, 2023]. The Mississippi State Medical Examiner's Office was unable to determine a cause or manner of death [WJTV, 2023]. Carter's family commissioned an independent autopsy and, through their attorney Ben Crump, sent a formal letter to the U.S. Department of Justice requesting a federal civil rights investigation. Crump described Carter's death as "a wicked act, an evil act" and stated, "There is nothing natural about this" ([Washington Post, 2023]. As of June 2024, twenty months after Carter's death, the case remained unsolved, with numerous law enforcement agencies involved and no arrests made ([Mississippi Link, 2024]. The family reported receiving no updates.


Bolivar County: Demartravion "Trey" Reed (2025)

On September 15, 2025, Demartravion "Trey" Reed, a twenty-one-year-old Black student at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, was found hanging from a tree on campus, near the pickleball courts. Local officials quickly ruled the death a suicide. The Bolivar County coroner reported no fractures, lacerations, contusions, or injuries consistent with an assault. Mississippi's state medical examiner listed hanging as the cause of death and suicide as the manner. The FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office received the investigative materials for review, but no criminal investigation was opened [USA Herald, 2026]; [The Marshall Project, 2025]. Reed's family disputes the ruling. His mother, Sophia Reed, and other family members learned of his death from the media before being notified by authorities, according to family lawyer Vanessa J. Jones. Claims circulated that an independent autopsy found head trauma, though that report had not been publicly released for independent review as of late 2025. Delta State University police chief Mike Peeler stated there was no evidence of foul play and referenced a video of Reed, though he did not specify what the video depicted [The Marshall Project, 2025]. The Marshall Project's investigation revealed a chilling pattern of at least eight Black men had been found hanging from trees in Mississippi since 2000, and every one of those deaths had been ruled a suicide. The location of the Mississippi Delta, where cotton plantations once drove the slave economy, was not incidental.


Hinds County: Dexter Wade (2023)

Dexter Wade was thirty-seven years old when he was struck and killed by an off-duty Jackson police officer driving a police vehicle in March 2023. What followed was not merely a failure of notification but what civil rights attorney Ben Crump called "a police killing cover-up" and what Rev. Wade's mother, Bettersten Wade, reported him missing on March 14, nine days after she had last heard from him. She did not learn of his death for six months. During that time, the Hinds County coroner had identified Wade and his relatives during the autopsy process, meaning the county knew who he was and how to reach his family. Yet Wade's remains were interred in an unmarked pauper's grave at the Hinds County Penal Farm without his mother's knowledge or consent (The Hill, 2023]; [MPB Online, 2023].


Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba attributed the burial to a "failure in communication" and stated there was no evidence of "malicious intent" [The Hill, 2023]. The Wade family had an existing wrongful death lawsuit against the Jackson Police Department in a separate case involving Bettersten Wade's brother, which complicated the city's characterization of institutional error as mere miscommunication. The Hinds County Board of Supervisors voted to order the exhumation of Wade's body for an independent autopsy but the exhumation was carried out hours before the family was present, raising further questions about the county's handling of the case. As of November 2025, nearly three years after Wade's death, his family continued to protest outside Jackson Police Department headquarters, demanding transparency and accountability [Clarion Ledger, 2025].


Hinds County: Tasia Fortune (2026)

Tasia Fortune was twenty-nine years old, a mother of four, when her body was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant house in Jackson, Mississippi, on August 3, 2026. Her mother, Christy Spivey, stated: "She did not do this to herself. I know my daughter, and she did not do this to herself" [Washington Informer, 2026]. An autopsy was performed on August 12, but as of September 2026, Jackson police had not publicly announced a final cause and manner of death. The investigation of the hate crime of gruesome murder remains open.


Jackson County: Nolan Wells (2026)

Nolan Xavier Wells was a bright eighteen years old, a student and wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College. On the Fourth of July, 2026, he traveled by boat to Horn Island, an uninhabited barrier island off the Mississippi coast, with three white friends he had known since high school in nearby Ocean Springs. His friends returned to the mainland without him, and they were in possession of his mobile phone [Reuters, 2026]; [CNN, 2026]. On July 6, 2026, a National Park Service agent found Wells's body facedown in the water off the shoreline of Horn Island. Less than an hour after the body was recovered, Wells's mother, Christine Wonsley, said Jackson County Sheriff John Ledbetter told her he believed the death was accidental and did not see foul play.


An independent autopsy commissioned by the family could not draw conclusions and could not rule out foul play, according to family attorney Ben Crump. The pathologist requested further information from the state medical examiner's initial autopsy. Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers Mcllrath announced that the case would be presented to a grand jury, but as of July 24, 2026, had not stated when jurors would convene or what specific evidence they would consider ([Reuters, 2026]. Two of Wells's friends, Warren Hudson and Jax Pitalo, returned to Horn Island in August to conduct their own investigation. No one has been arrested or charged. The Congressional Black Caucus joined the family in calling for DOJ and FBI involvement [Clarion Ledger, 2026]. Today, the case remains unsolved.


Rankin County: The "Goon Squad" (2023)

In January 2023, six white former Rankin County sheriff's deputies part of a self-styled "Goon Squad" known locally for using violent and aggressive tactics conducted a no-warrant house raid in which they tortured two Black men, Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker, for hours. The officers sexually assaulted the men, shot Jenkins in the mouth, and used a racial slur during the assault; [Goon Squad, New York Times, 2024]; [Goon Squad, AP, 2024].



Michael Corey Jenkins
Michael Corey Jenkins


Eddie Terrell Parker
Eddie Terrell Parker

U.S. District Judge Tom Lee, sitting in the Southern District of Mississippi, sentenced the officers in March 2024 on federal civil rights charges: Christian Dedmon received 40 years, Brett McAlpin more than 27 years, Hunter Elward 20 years, Jeffrey Middleton 17.5 years, Daniel Opdyke 17.5 years, and Joshua Hartfield, a former Richland police officer 10 years. All six were subsequently sentenced on state charges to terms of 15 to 45 years.The Rankin County Sheriff's Office was headed by Sheriff Bryan Bailey, whom community members had marched to demand be terminated and prosecuted for running an agency that allegedly terrorized Black people in the county.The Goon Squad case is significant as it represents the rare instance in which the violence was so flagrant and so thoroughly documented that federal prosecution became unavoidable. The case revealed what happens when local accountability structures fail entirely and only federal intervention can impose consequence.


Hinds County / Jackson: James Craig Anderson (2011)

James Craig Anderson was forty-seven years old when, around five o'clock in the morning on June 26, 2011, a group of ten white teenagers attacked and killed him in Jackson, Mississippi. Deryl Dedmon, eighteen, ran over Anderson with a 1998 Ford F-250 truck. The attack was a hate crime part of a pattern of racially motivated assaults the group had committed. The FBI's investigation resulted in federal hate crimes charges against ten individuals, all of whom were sentenced. Dedmon received life in prison after pleading guilty to murder and a hate crime charge before a judge in Jackson, who called the crime "despicable" ([CBS19] [FBI, 2015].

Claiborne County: Otis Byrd (2015)

Otis Byrd was fifty-four years old when he was found hanging from a tree by a bedsheet on March 19, 2015, in a wooded area about a half-mile from his home in rural Claiborne County. He had been missing for seventeen days after being dropped off near a casino in Vicksburg. Claiborne County Sheriff Marvin Lucas called in the FBI. Federal investigators concluded there was "no foul play" and preliminary autopsy results "strongly suggested" suicide. [The Olympian, 2015]. Byrd's family and community were suspicious. The Mississippi Link reported that Byrd was "very adamant that he would never take his own life". Roughly a dozen people gathered in downtown Port Gibson to show support for the family [Mississippi Link, 2015].


III. Institutions, Officials, and the Pattern of Disbelief


A pattern emerges across these cases that is structural and operates through a sequence of institutional acts each defensible in isolation, devastating in aggregate:


  1. Premature closure. In nearly every case, local authorities declared "no foul play" or ruled suicide before a full investigation was conducted. Sheriff Joel Houston of Smith County announced "no reason to believe foul play was involved" the day after Rasheem Carter's scattered remains were found. Sheriff John Ledbetter of Jackson County told Nolan Wells's mother within an hour of her son's body being recovered that the death was accidental. In Bolivar County, Trey Reed's death was quickly ruled a suicide. The speed of these declarations issued before autopsies, before forensic analysis, and before witness interviews was complete constitutes a form of institutional pre-judgment and error that forecloses the possibility of proper investigation.

  2. Coroner's reports and the medical examiner's silence. According to reporting on the JULIAN organization's 2026 report, A Crimson Record, the study documented over 70 suspected modern-day lynchings across seven Southern states between 2000 and 2025. Mississippi led all states with 20 cases. The report identifies recurring patterns of "systemic neglect" in which local coroners "prematurely" classify deaths and describes modern-day lynchings as occurring in the gaps "between coroner's reports and truth" and "between official explanations and the lived experience of grieving families" [The Grio, 2026]; [Emerald Book, 2026]. The Mississippi State Medical Examiner's Office was unable to determine a cause or manner of death for Rasheem Carter, whose remains were found scattered and decapitated, according to family attorneys. That an official finding of "undetermined" could coexist with the sheriff's declaration of "no foul play" reveals a system in which the absence of a determined cause is treated as the absence of a crime.

  3. The DOJ's conspicuous restraint. The Department of Justice has been formally requested to intervene in the Carter, Wade, Wells, and Reed cases. The FBI received investigative materials in the Reed case for review. The Congressional Black Caucus joined the Wells family in calling for a federal investigation. Yet as of this writing, no federal civil rights prosecution has been announced in any of these cases. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, signed into law on March 29, 2022, made lynching a federal hate crime punishable by up to 30 years' imprisonment ([NPR, 2022].

    The law exists. The prosecutions do not.

  4. The grand jury as delay. In the Nolan Wells case, District Attorney Angel Myers Mcllrath announced that the case would go to a grand jury but did not say when, what evidence would be presented, or what charges might be considered. The grand jury process, while a legitimate legal mechanism, functions in these contexts as a form of institutional deferral: it moves the question of justice into a closed proceeding, away from public scrutiny, and buys time. The family waits. The public forgets. The news cycle moves on.

  5. The media-before-family notification. In the Trey Reed case, the family learned of his death from the media before being notified by authorities. In the Dexter Wade case, the family was not notified of his death for six months, despite the coroner having identified him and his relatives during the autopsy. These are not isolated administrative errors. They are acts of institutional disregard for Black death and grief a refusal to extend to Black families the basic dignity of timely, honest notification that white families in comparable circumstances would expect as a matter of course.


IV. Necropolitics: The Theoretical Framework


The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, in his 2003 essay and subsequent 2019 book Necropolitics, argues that,

..."the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die"
[Mbembe, Necropolitics, 2003]

Building on and extending Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, Mbembe argues that sovereignty is the power to distribute death by way of designating certain populations as expendable, to confine them to what he calls "deathworlds," defined as "new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead." Mbembe identifies racism as the "prime driver" of necropolitics. Under necropower, racialized people's lives are "systemically cheapened" and "habituated to loss." The lines between resistance and suicide, between sacrifice and redemption, and between martyrdom and freedom are deliberately blurred as a formulation that acquires terrifying specificity in the context of Black men found hanging from trees and officially classified as suicides.


What Mbembe describes at the level of theory, Mississippi demonstrates at the level of practice. The necropolitical logic is not always overt. It does not require a sheriff to participate in a killing. It requires only that the sheriff declare "no foul play" before the body is cold. It requires only that the coroner rule suicide within the hour. It requires only that the medical examiner find "undetermined," and the system treats that as closure. It requires only that the Department of Justice receive a request for investigation and decline to act. Necropolitics, in the American context, is the ritualistic spectacle of public lynchings and the bureaucratic quiet of a death classified, filed, and forgotten. The terror has moved, as the JULIAN report notes, from public ritual to institutional silence.


Lauren Berlant's concept of "slow death," the gradual and persistent process of elimination imposed on specific populations, offers an additional lens. Berlant describes how certain populations are subjected to conditions that confer upon them the status of the "living dead" long before their physical deaths. In Mississippi, this slow death is visible in the maternal mortality rate for Black women (49.5 per 100,000, versus 19 per 100,000 for white women), in the police killings that exceeded 1,225 nationwide in 2024, and in the Cancer Alley parishes of neighboring Louisiana, where Black residents face cancer risks more than seven times the national average [Human Rights Watch, 2025]. The suspected lynchings, disputed hangings, and racially charged deaths are the visible tip of a necropolitical iceberg.


V. The 2026 Black Death Toll


The pattern is not confined to Mississippi. In 2026 alone, at least ten Black people have been found hanging from trees across the United States, from the Deep South to the Midwest to the nation's capital (The Grio, 2026). The cases below compiled from reporting by the Grio, the Washington Informer, USA Herald, the Amsterdam News, CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, and local outlets represent the known toll of Black Death under circumstances families and communities describe as suspicious across a single calendar year.

Hanging Deaths in 2026

This is not an extensive list. Please add to the list in the comments.

Victim

Age

Date

Location

County/State

Official Finding

Family/Community Response

Kyle Bassinga

21

Feb. 18, 2026

Fair Oaks Park, Marietta

Cobb County, Georgia

Police ruled suicide; cited surveillance video, phone records, witness accounts

Family and community questioned the finding; Bassinga was a Georgia State University student (The Grio, 2026)

Isaac Carlos Aguirre

19

Apr. 13, 2026

Near MPD Fourth District station, Quackenbos Street NW

Washington, D.C.

Police said no foul play; treated as suicide investigation

MPD did not issue a public statement for three days, prompting protests and demands for transparency. Family demanded investigation (Davis Vanguard, 2026)

Juliana Umba Nzita

16

May 8, 2026

Church property, Charlotte

Mecklenburg County, North Carolina

Ruled suicide within three days; no autopsy performed; case closed

Family sought independent autopsy and legal counsel. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Community Relations Committee publicly questioned the investigation. A ratchet strap encircled her neck; her feet reportedly touched the ground beside a small chair (The Grio, 2026; USA Herald, 2026)

To'Nea Nicole Miller

27

June 18, 2026 (day before Juneteenth)

Gwen Cherry Park, Miami

Miami-Dade County, Florida

Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office ruled apparent suicide; found no evidence of foul play; case closed

Sister Teri Miller publicly rejected the conclusion. Family launched GoFundMe for independent autopsy. Miller had come to Miami to celebrate Juneteenth (Amsterdam News, 2026; Miami Times, 2026)

Tasia Fortune

29

Aug. 3, 2026

Behind vacant house, Jackson

Hinds County, Mississippi

Investigation ongoing; autopsy performed but no cause/manner publicly announced

Mother Christy Spivey: "She did not do this to herself." Jackson City Councilman Kenneth Stokes called for federal assistance (Washington Informer, 2026; Amsterdam News, 2026)

Demetrius Eugene Fleming

38

Aug. 21, 2026

Roanoke Avenue, Roanoke Rapids

Halifax County, North Carolina

Investigation ongoing; Police Chief Lawrence Wiggins said "everything is on the table"

Family and community demand answers. Fleming was a father of nine. Wiggins acknowledged "the implications surrounding the death of a Black man by hanging" (The Grio, 2026; WITN, 2026)

Jerard "Jay" Jackson

28

2026

Found dead after attending a music festival in Michigan

Michigan (from Illinois)

Details limited; the article states no evidence of an attack was found

Family and advocates included his name among the 2026 hanging deaths demanding federal investigation (The Grio, 2026; Amsterdam News, 2026)


Victim

Age

Date

County

State

Circumstances

Official Ruling

Justice Kai James

21

June 21, 2026

Dougherty County (Albany)

Georgia

Found unresponsive near cafeteria at Turner Job Corps. Students saw him alive at 8:30 PM, found dead at 9:30 PM. Working toward second trade certification.

Ruled suicide on July 20

Tripp Brazeale

15

May 2026

St. Francis County (Forrest City)

Arkansas

Fled into the woods during encounter with sheriff's deputy. Found hanging from a tree two days later. Deputy Alvin Merle "Trey" Bynum was suspected in the case and later arrested on child pornography charges. Bynum had access to Tripp in the hours before his death.

Initially ruled suicide, later changed to "undetermined"

Unnamed Black man

32

August 15, 2026

Wake County (Raleigh)

North Carolina

Found hanging from a tree during CaribMask Caribbean festival weekend. Police said surveillance showed him arriving alone with an electrical cord. Family asked not to circulate his name.

Ruled suicide

Killings by Police and Under Suspicious Circumstances in 2026

The hangings are not the only form of Black death demanding scrutiny in 2026. At least 712 people had been killed by police in the United States as of August 18, 2026, with Black people killed at nearly three times the rate of white people per capita (Mapping Police Violence, 2026). The Violence Policy Center found that Black Americans accounted for more than half (52.2%) of all homicide victims in the United States while comprising only 13.7% of the population (VPC, 2026).


Victim

Age

Date

Location

County/State

Circumstances

Status

Daniel Erving

18

Apr. 14–18, 2026

Lake Ray Hubbard, Dallas area

Dallas County, Texas

Went to lake with friends; body found four days later; ruled accidental drowning. Mother says autopsy showed unobstructed airway. Erving was a swim team member. Two teens charged with tampering with evidence

Family seeks murder charges; family attorney Ben Crump involved (CNN, 2026; WSMV, 2026)

Tyler Smith

18

July 4, 2026

Party in Lexington

Fayette County, Kentucky

Fatally shot; police ruled self-inflicted. Family attorney Ben Crump said the firearm recovered did not match

Family strongly disputes the finding; police never publicly identified Smith as the victim (Atlanta Black Star, 2026; WSMV, 2026)

Corey Durell Ruiz

38

July 22, 2026

Madison

Dane County, Wisconsin

Four officers held Ruiz down and shot him three times during attempted arrest. Bystander video went viral. Officers said he pulled a knife; Taser was deployed first

Investigation as homicide by Wisconsin DOJ Division of Criminal Investigation. No arrests made. Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway called for "full transparency and accountability" (NBC News, 2026; Reuters, 2026; AP, 2026)

Hate Crime Convictions in 2026

Victim

Perpetrator

Date of Crime

Conviction/Sentencing

Location

Details

O'Shae Sibley

Dmitriy Popov

July 29, 2023

Convicted June 8, 2026; sentenced July 16, 2026 to 20 years

Brooklyn, New York

Sibley, a Black gay professional dancer, was stabbed to death at a gas station while dancing to Beyoncé music. Popov, then 17, used a knife to penetrate Sibley's heart. Convicted of manslaughter as a hate crime (Brooklyn DA, 2026; NY Daily News, 2026)

Unnamed Black woman

Adan Hernandez-Mayoral

2025

Sentenced June 2, 2026 to 54 months

King County, Washington

Hernandez-Mayoral stabbed a Black woman passenger on a Metro bus because of her race. DOJ prosecuted as federal hate crime (Washington Times, 2026; DOJ, 2026)

On September 8, 2026, nearly sixty Congressional Democrats led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), and Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), sent a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel demanding "a thorough, transparent, and comprehensive federal investigation into every hanging death of a Black individual across the United States." The letter stated,

"The growing number of Black people found hanging in public is a national crisis," and warned that "inaction by the federal government is tantamount to complicity" (Pressley Congressional Letter, 2026)

Since January 20th, 2025, there has been, to what appears to be, a systemic dismantling of the federal infrastructure designed to protect civil rights. Human Rights Watch's August 2026 report, Remedies Abandoned: US Civil Rights Enforcement Under the Trump Administration, documented the destruction across four key agencies between January 2025 and spring 2026 (Human Rights Watch, 2026):


  • The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division was reduced from approximately 400 attorneys to 110 by June 2025, a 75% reduction. The Special Litigation Section, which worked on police reform, was reduced from more than 70 attorneys to fewer than 20 as of April 2026. The Voting Rights Section was reduced to three lawyers (HRW, 2026).

  • At least six police reform consent decrees were dismissed or moved toward dismissal, including those covering the Louisville Metro Police Department, which had been found to have a pattern of racially discriminatory force and the Minneapolis Police Department, whose consent decree was built on 2,300 community testimonies documenting discrimination against Black and Native American people. In each case, the Justice Department withdrew before any independent finding that the underlying violations had stopped (HRW, 2026; The Guardian, 2025).

  • On March 21, 2026, the Justice Department dropped the last criminal charges against two officers who had lied on the warrant that led to the killing of Breonna Taylor. Her mother, Tamika Palmer, was sitting outside the courthouse when the dismissal was announced. "She was killed because of their lies and negligence," Palmer said. "Somebody should be held accountable for that" (HRW, 2026).

  • The Education Department's Office for Civil Rights lost 299 staff members in a single day (March 11, 2025), more than half its workforce, and closed seven of its twelve regional offices. OCR resolved only 112 civil rights cases in all of 2025, down from 507 in 2024 a 78% decline. It reported zero resolution agreements for racial harassment, sexual harassment, sexual violence, discriminatory school discipline, or seclusion and restraint of students with disabilities (HRW, 2026).

  • On April 23, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14281, directing every federal agency to eliminate disparate-impact analysis "to the maximum degree possible." In December 2025, the Justice Department formally rescinded its Title VI disparate-impact regulations the legal framework through which OCR had identified school districts that suspended Black students at double the rate for identical conduct (HRW, 2026).

  • In April 2025, the Justice Department dismissed a school desegregation consent decree in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, that had been in place since 1966. Department officials told reporters they intended to extend this approach to other desegregation orders across the South (HRW, 2026).

  • The HUD Office of Fair Housing was reduced from 31 staff members to 11. A whistleblower complaint documented at least 115 fair housing cases closed or halted without findings. The attorneys who filed the whistleblower complaint were fired seven weeks after it became public (HRW, 2026).

  • More than 200 former Civil Rights Division attorneys signed a public letter on December 9, 2025, describing the changes as "extraordinary and destructive." A former section chief described it as "someone taking an axe to the place" (HRW, 2026).


The connection between this institutional demolition and the deaths catalogued above is is structural. When the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division loses 75% of its attorneys, there is no one to investigate the hanging of Demetrius Fleming in Roanoke Rapids. When consent decrees are dismissed, the police departments that were found to have engaged in racially discriminatory force return to their practices without oversight. When the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights closes its regional offices and resolves zero racial harassment cases, the children who might have learned to recognize racial terror are taught instead that the state has no interest in protecting them. When the President of the United States uses what the United Nations calls "racist hate speech" and signs executive orders eliminating the legal tools to address discriminatory effects, the message sent to every sheriff, every coroner, every prosecutor, and every citizen is that Black lives are not a federal priority (OHCHR, 2026).


The necropolitical logic Mbembe described operates through this architecture of abandonment. It does not require the state to kill. It requires only that the state withdraw from investigation, from enforcement, from accountability and allow the killing to proceed unimpeded. In 2026, the United States has engineered this withdrawal.

VI. The Manufacturing of Amnesia


The South lost the Civil War, but it did not lose the war that followed. As the Confederate journalist Edward A. Pollard wrote in 1867, in the book that gave the Lost Cause its name: "All that is left the South is the war of ideas." The Confederacy's military surrender at Appomattox became, in Robert Penn Warren's formulation, the moment of its ideological immortality: "In the moment of its death, the Confederacy entered upon its immortality" (Emerging Civil War, 2020).


The historian David Blight, in Race and Reunion (2001), documented how the South won that war of ideas in a process he described as "a story of how in American culture romance triumphed over reality, sentimental remembrance won over ideological memory." Blight's research showed that "the South thus fought and won this 50-year propaganda campaign, as most Americans internalized Lost Cause ideology," achieving what he called "national reunion on Southern "terms" of reconciliation between North and South accomplished "at the expense of forgetting the African-Americans" and their "claims to citizenship and political equality" (SuperSummary; Emerging Civil War, 2020; Claremont Review of Books). The United Daughters of the Confederacy, through textbook committees and school curricula, "successfully manipulated historical records, argued against slavery as the war's cause, and injected Lost Cause mythology into systems of education," teaching generations of American children that the Civil War was not about slavery, that enslaved people were contented, and that the Confederacy was a noble cause (SuperSummary; Facing South, 2019).


W.E.B. Du Bois diagnosed this process in 1935 with foresight and accuracy. In "The Propaganda of History," the final chapter of Black Reconstruction in America, he wrote:

"In order to paint the South as a martyr to inescapable fate, to make the North the magnanimous emancipator, and to ridicule the Negro as the impossible joke in the whole development, we have in fifty years, by libel, innuendo and silence, so completely misstated and obliterated the history of the Negro in America and his relation to its work and government that today it is almost unknown."

Du Bois called this poor scholarship and "dangerous" due to "the part foundation of our present lawlessness and loss of democratic ideals" that had "led the world to embrace and worship the color bar as social salvation." He described,

"a stupendous effort the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an effort involving universities, history, science, social life and religion" (Du Bois, 1935).

That effort succeeded. Its success is measurable in what American students do not know. The Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Hard History report concluded that American schools are "not adequately teaching the history of American slavery," that educators are "not sufficiently prepared to teach it," and that textbooks "do not have enough material about it," resulting in students who lack "a basic knowledge of the important role it played in shaping the United States and the impact it continues to have on race relations in America" (SPLC, 2024; EdWeek, 2018). The SPLC's finding was unequivocal: "We miseducate students because of it" (SPLC, 2024). The New York Times' 2019 investigation found "widespread slavery illiteracy among students," with students demonstrating widespread misunderstanding of basic facts about slavery and its role as the central cause of the Civil War (New York Times, 2019; EdWeek, 2018). Ta-Nehisi Coates traced the throughline with devastating clarity:

"Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole" (Coates, 2014).

This miseducation is the necessary precondition for the repetition of racial violence. Cornel West, in Race Matters (1993), identified the deeper disease as economic deprivation or political powerlessness and "the profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair so widespread in Black America." West called this nihilism "not as a philosophic doctrine that there are no rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority" but as "the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness" (Solidarity, 1993). In a 2020 interview, West extended the diagnosis to the entire American polity: "What has happened in the wholesale commodification of American culture is the gangsterization of American life... That's spiritual decay." He warned that "very deep racist and white supremacist sensibilities" persist in the American psyche, providing "a narrative to deal with these fears and anxieties" (National Observer, 2020).

This is the insidious sickness at the root of American culture, a psychological architecture built on the denial of Black humanity, maintained through the silencing of Black history, and expressed through the bureaucratic indifference to Black death.

Carol Anderson, in White Rage (2016), described how this sickness operates through the spectacular violence of the Klan and especially through the quiet machinery of institutions:

"White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly."

She quoted a historian's paraphrase of Frederick Maitland: "The slave law of the South may have been dead, but it ruled us from the grave" (Anderson, 2016). If the public does not comprehend lynching as a historical continuum, if each hanging death is treated as an isolated incident, a tragic anomaly, or a suicide, then the pattern is invisible. James Baldwin named the mechanism decades ago: "the dangerous and reverberating silence" of the unspoken story of racial brutality that, as Baldwin warned, qualifies any claim for the achievements of American democracy. The silence surrounding Black death in America is not the absence of speech. It is a form of speech as a declaration that these deaths will continue (University of Kentucky, on Baldwin). Ibram X. Kendi diagnosed the disease precisely:

"Some Americans insist that we're living in a post-racial society. But racist thought is not just alive and well in America, it is more sophisticated and more insidious than ever" (Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning).

The student who was never taught that Mississippi had hundreds of documented lynchings between 1877 and 1950 cannot be expected to recognize the significance of a Black man found hanging from a tree on a Mississippi university campus in 2025. The citizen who was never taught that the Confederacy's ideology survived its military defeat cannot be expected to recognize the pattern when that ideology's descendants in sheriff's offices, coroner's offices, and prosecutor's offices declare "no foul play" before the body is cold. The nation that was never taught that its wealth was built on Black bodies cannot be expected to recognize the epidemic when those bodies keep appearing hanging, shot, and dismembered under circumstances that are always called accidents, always called suicides, never called what they are: gradual genocidal acts.


VII. America's Moral Decadence in Global Context


The United States ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) nearly sixty years ago. Human Rights Watch's World Report 2025 concluded that "racial justice remained a pressing human rights concern in the United States in 2024" and that the country "has done far too little" to address it [Human Rights Watch, 2025]. In March 2026, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) issued a statement warning that "racist hate speech by political leaders, including the President," combined with intensified immigration crackdowns, had sparked "grave human rights violations" in the United States. The Committee stated that the dissemination of "negative and harmful stereotypes" by politicians "at the highest level" "may incite racial discrimination and hate crimes" [OHCHR, 2026]. At a 2020 UN Human Rights Council review, the United States faced significant criticism from both allies and adversaries regarding police brutality against African Americans, the application of the death penalty, and the separation of migrant children from their parents.


The international consequences of American hypocrisy are not merely rhetorical. A 2025 study published in the *British Journal of Political Science* found that American human rights violations "strengthen" authoritarian norms in other states when the United States tolerates the abuse of its own minorities, it provides cover for authoritarian regimes to do the same. China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian stated that "racism against ethnic minorities in the U.S. is a chronic disease of American society" [Cambridge University Press, 2025]. A separate study found that exposure to news about American discrimination against minorities "significantly reduces" support for human rights norms among populations in democratic countries like India [University of Kent, 2026].


What the world sees when it looks at Mississippi is not a regional anomaly. It sees a nation that passed an anti-lynching law in 2022 and has not used it. It sees a nation where Black men and women are found dead under circumstances families describe as suspicious, and the official response is "no foul play." It sees a nation that lectures the world on human rights while its own institutions manufacture disbelief in the face of Black death. This is the seamless integration of racial violence into the bureaucratic machinery of the state, so thorough that the violence becomes invisible to those who administer it.


VIII. The Demand


This article claims that the institutional and societal response to each of these deaths follows a pattern so consistent, so predictable, and so resistant to accountability that the pattern itself constitutes a form of structural violence.


Release the autopsy reports. Conduct independent investigations. Convene the grand juries. Let the Department of Justice do what the Emmett Till Antilynching Act empowered it to do. Name the officials who declared "no foul play" before the bodies were examined. Name the coroners who ruled suicide within the hour. Name the prosecutors who deferred and the sheriffs who shaped the narrative before the evidence was gathered. Where judges or courts became involved, identify their rulings and the public record. Hold the institutions of the Smith County Sheriff's Office, the Jackson County Sheriff's Department, the Bolivar County Coroner's Office, the Hinds County Penal Farm, the Rankin County Sheriff's Office accountable for what they refused to do.
Teach the children the truth about slavery, about lynching, and about the hundreds of documented racial terror lynchings in Mississippi alone. Teach them that the tree is not a metaphor. Teach them that "no foul play" is not a finding. It is a verdict rendered without trial, without evidence, and without the dignity of investigation against the dead.

Mbembe wrote that under necropower, the lines between resistance and suicide are deliberately blurred. In Mississippi, those lines are drawn by a coroner's pen and a sheriff's press release. The question is not whether Black people are dying under suspicious circumstances in Mississippi. The question is whether the American people have the moral capacity to do something about it and its own genocidal terror against human beings.




Sources:


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