African Americans Don’t Hang Themselves From Trees

It’s 2025. Once considered a futuristic number, Earl Smith and Demartravion “Trey” Reed were found hanging from trees in New York and Mississippi. Evidence that America has not turned over a new leaf when it comes to “race relations,” its cities continue to bear this “strange fruit.” 

More than a setback, it takes the country back to the first lynching of Francis McIntosh in 1836. McIntosh had killed a deputy sheriff while being taken to jail and was subsequently captured by a mob, chained to a tree, and set on fire in front of a large crowd. 

A 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln referenced the event in his 1838 Lyceum Address, expressing concern over vigilantism rather than the murder itself. In his speech, he said: “I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us.”

He continued, “I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny.”

Nearly two hundred years later, there remains “white silence.” “White silence” operates by denying, minimizing and ignoring these injustices, making it difficult to challenge the existing power structure.

While rumors of the rapture spread on social media, of Jesus returning on a cloud for his followers, African American bodies were suspended in the air. Feet not touching the ground and yet descending, they died prematurely “at the hands of persons unknown.” Despite reports of no foul play from the authorities, their deaths have been marked suspicious by friends, family and community members due in part to the history of lynching in America. 

“During the period between the Civil War and World War II, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States,” the Equal Justice Initiative published in Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. “Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials.”

Both recent cases were ruled as suicides. But African Americans don’t hang themselves from trees. 

Because “these lynchings were terrorism,” the Equal Justice Initiative’s publication stated. “‘Terror lynchings’ peaked between 1880 and 1940 and claimed the lives of African American men, women and children who were forced to endure the fear, humiliation, and barbarity of this widespread phenomenon unaided.”

Reed’s family requested a second autopsy of his body and former NFL star Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Foundation will cover the cost. Because lynchings often occurred without legal consequence and mobs would often go to great lengths to destroy evidence and silence witnesses. Because police officers and government officials were often involved. 

Because this is far from the first time, but not the last occurrence. In 2022, the death of Rasheem Carter in Mississippi drew national attention after his remains were found dismembered and scattered in the woods. 

Before his disappearance, Carter told his family that men racialized as white were chasing him. Despite the suspicious circumstances, which his family and activists called a modern-day lynching, police initially claimed no foul play was suspected. “No justice for Rasheem Carter – twenty months and ticking – Numerous law agencies investigating horrifying act in Taylorsville – fear and suspicion remain,” The Mississippi Link reported on October 1.

While fear remains, there is no suspicion in the case of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. The child was brutally lynched in Money, Mississippi in 1955 after he allegedly grabbed and verbally threatened Carolyn Bryant Donham, a European American woman. But, in a 2008 interview, Donham told historian Timothy Tyson, author of The Blood of Emmett Till, that the crucial parts of her testimony were false. 

DuBois called the South “Hell,” and Mississippi was one of five states that consumed the most African American bodies by way of lynching. “By 1920, in fact, there had been more than a thousand lynchings per decade; and in the rebel South, almost 90 percent of those killed were African American,” Carol Anderson wrote in White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. “Five states—Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Alabama, and Louisiana— accounted for more than half of all lynchings in the nation.”

Yet Carolyn Bryant Donham died on April 25, 2023, without being held accountable. The hands of Till’s murderers were not unknown. His killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, confessed to his gruesome murder in Look Magazine after they were “acquitted by an all- white jury.”

The U.S. Department of Justice closed Till’s case after opening it in 2004 and again in 2017. “New information emerged suggesting that the woman may have confessed to a professor, who later wrote a book about Till’s murder, that the account she provided to the state court in 1955 was untrue,” the government website states. In the end, however, “even if the government could prove that she recanted her prior state court testimony, the federal government could not prosecute her for perjury for her 1955 testimony.”

Besides, “perjury in state court is not a federal offense,” the Department of Justice argued and then there is the statute of limitations. It also wasn’t illegal.

Lynching did not become illegal until the 2022 signing of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. What a cruel irony.

“First, lynching is colorline murder. Second, crimes against women is the excuse, not the cause. Third, it is a national crime and requires a national remedy,” Ida B. Well, a journalist and leading figure in the anti-lynching campaign, said at the National Negro Conference in New York City in 1909.

It took nearly 200 years for this “national remedy” and still it did not prevent Earl Smith and Demartravion “Trey” Reed from being hung from trees. Because it is an explicit and unnatural death. 

The meaning of this “national crime” has been burned into the flesh of lynching victims as well as the trees and the earth as unwilling accomplices. The message has not changed as explained by Richard Wright after the lynching of his uncle Silas Hoskins in 1916 in Arkansas:

“There was only silence, quiet weeping, whispers and fears. Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst and we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence.” 

Further, the dead cannot speak and it is unlikely that the onlookers will either. 

So, the Equal Justice Initiative can erect another large, rectangular steel monument at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Because African Americans don’t hang themselves from trees.