New report says lynching "evolved" in U.S., not ended

Driving the news: Mississippi-based civil rights group JULIAN identified 70 "modern-day lynchings" in seven southern states from 2000 to 2025 in a report released last month.

• The report, called The Crimson Record, lists cases across Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama and says the total could exceed 100 when suspicious deaths are included.
• Mississippi had the most cases with 20.

What they're saying: "The moment a case is ruled a suicide, it's no longer investigated as a potential homicide," JULIAN founder Jill Collen Jefferson told Axios.

Case in point: Jermaine Carter, a Black man found hanging from a tree in Greenwood, Mississippi, in December 2010, was ruled a suicide by local authorities, though his family and civil-rights groups have long challenged that finding.

• Rodney Thompson's death was also initially described as a suicide after neighbors found him hanging from a tree in his southeast Memphis backyard in November 2009.
• Authorities in Memphis and Leflore County, Mississippi, did not respond to Axios' requests for comment.

Advocates point to recent deaths — including the case last month of Kyle Bassinga in Metro Atlanta — as examples of how these situations can quickly become contested between communities and investigators.

• Bassinga was found hanging in a wooded area of a Cobb County park after being reported missing, prompting speculation about foul play.
• Cobb County police and officials declined an interview request, referring Axios to a prior public statement that maintained investigators found "no indicators" of another person's involvement and are treating the case as a suicide while awaiting autopsy results.
• Authorities warned that online misinformation has fueled fear, emphasizing that the investigation is ongoing.

Jefferson says cases like Bassinga's show the need to consider homicide from the start.

• "It defies logic to assume someone climbed eight or nine feet into a tree with no ladder, no chair, no evidence of how they got there," Jefferson said.

Context: Civil rights attorney and legal analyst Sunny Slaughter, who was not involved in the report, said death investigations often hinge on medical examiner determinations, which can influence whether police pursue a homicide inquiry.

• Families can challenge such rulings, she said, but investigations rarely shift unless the medical examiner changes the manner of death.

Zoom out: Sociologist Amy Kate Bailey of the University of Illinois Chicago, who studies historical lynching records, said disputes over how deaths are classified have long been part of the historical record.

• "There's a really important conceptual thread that links historical campaigns of racial terror to patterns we still see today," Bailey said, referencing research that includes nearly 6,500 documented racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1950.
• "Violence changes form over time, but the underlying dynamics don't just disappear."

Catch up quick: In March 2022, President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime for the first time after more than a century of failed efforts.

• The law targets conspiracies to commit hate crimes resulting in death or serious injury, with penalties up to 30 years.

JULIAN's memo calls the law "toothless," with no widely reported prosecutions having been brought under the statute.

• "Lynching didn't stop — it adapted," Jefferson said. "If we don't investigate these deaths with the possibility of homicide in mind, we may never know what really happened."

Go deeper: "Printing Hate" details U.S. newspapers' roles in lynchings