Since 2024, to judge from news reports, there have been at least 10 Black people found hanged in public in the United States. Eight of these cases have been officially ruled suicides or are being treated as such given no signs of foul play. In neither of the other two has a white suspect been named.
But many people harbor suspicions. Civil rights lawyers, pastors and family members (as well as myriad commentators on social media) have speculated that these deaths were lynchings — homicides perpetrated by whites to sow terror in Black communities.
And now Congress is getting involved. Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, cited those 10 recent deaths in a letter this month that called for a federal investigation into all hanging deaths of Black people in the country. (She also cited a report of 70 “modern-day lynchings” between 2000 and 2025, though the report uses “lynching” broadly to encompass a wide range of deaths, most of which do not involve hanging.)
Pressley’s letter, which was signed by 58 other Democrats in Congress, argued that deaths by hanging “raise significant suspicion of foul play given the role of lynching in our nation’s history.” On social media, she used language that suggested even more strongly that many of the deaths were lynchings. “This is a national crisis,” she wrote, “and we CANNOT stand by while strange fruit hangs from trees across the country.”
I dearly hope that the 10 cases that are generating so much suspicion were not lynchings. And though it’s impossible to know for sure what happened in every case, I also think it highly unlikely that they represent a wave of lynchings, given the evidence presented so far by the authorities, and I expect any federal investigation to confirm that. But mainly, I hope that those raising the alarm of widespread racial terrorism would be in a position to accept such a verdict — rather than falling for the idea that assuming the worst is a form of higher awareness.
Death by hanging is sadly common, with it and other forms of asphyxiation representing about a quarter of the suicides in the United States. When a white person is found hanged, the usual assumption is that the death was a suicide. The question is whether we should think otherwise when the person is Black.
Lynchings, of course, once loomed as a real and grisly threat over Black communities — arbitrary killings, treated as a public spectacle for whites, and unpunished. And there are certainly cases in which police officers have claimed that someone in their custody died by suicide, but the circumstances strongly suggest that the individual was killed by the police.
But what Pressley and others are suggesting is different: that today, white people are hanging Black people for the purpose of terrorizing Black communities, and that local authorities are consistently overlooking it or covering it up.
In the cases Pressley’s letter cites, there is often good reason to think otherwise. Consider a few examples:
In 2024, Javion Magee, a 21-year-old Black truck driver, was found dead in North Carolina with a rope around his neck, dangling from a tree. There is surveillance video of Magee buying the rope.
In 2025, Demartravion Reed, a 21-year-old Black student at Delta State University in Mississippi, was discovered hanged from a tree on campus. Reed had sent his girlfriend suicidal text messages the night before.
In the case of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old woman who was found hanged from a tree in Mississippi last month, two people have now been arrested in connection with her death — but they are both Black men, which runs counter to the idea that these cases are reanimations of old-school racism.
Of course, further investigation could reveal, in these or any of the other cases, that things are not what they seem. (The Fortune case is one of the two of the 10 that have not been ruled a suicide; the other, involving the death of Demetrius Fleming, is still being investigated.) But in the face of the evidence we have so far, and given the incendiary nature of the claim, why would anyone say that the United States is experiencing a “national crisis” of lynchings?
One reason is a stylized wariness that Black Americans are often taught as a kind of wisdom — to be ever on guard that the bad old days could return at any moment.
Another reason is a belief that Black people don’t hang themselves because of the fraught historical associations with the act. “It is very uncommon for young Black men to commit suicide, let alone by hanging,” Raymond Winbush, a psychologist who has treated hundreds of Black men and boys, told The Washington Post.
“That’s not the way we do” is how Black Americans often put it in conversation. But we must ask, with all due compassion: Suppose it is? The cases in question are few in number. To say something is uncommon is to grant that it does happen sometimes.
Many were skeptical that Sandra Bland, a Black activist incarcerated in Texas after a contentious traffic stop, hanged herself in her jail cell in 2015. However, after the F.B.I. investigated the case, few now dispute that, tragically, she did. Surveillance video recorded a Black man, Malcolm Harsch, 38, hanging himself in Victorville, Calif., in 2020.
Of course, it is possible that the United States is experiencing a wave of racial terror in which white people are hanging Black people in public, with coroners and investigators either complicit or trembling in fear of reprisal and declaring these deaths suicides despite evidence to the contrary. So I say let the investigation happen.
But sometimes, when history seems to be repeating itself, we have to allow that the resemblance is accidental. In 1995 and 1996, more than 35 Black churches burned down in the United States. At the time, this generated understandable alarm: These burnings seemed to be gruesome recapitulations of tragedies such as the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. A Newsweek article at the time noted, “The sheer number of Black church arsons, which now equals the worst years of white racist terror in the 1950s and 60s, suggests a spreading virus of copycat malice.”
The truth, however, appeared to be more mundane. Churches, it turns out, are natural targets for arsonists of all stripes, since they are often old buildings made of wood and unoccupied during the week. Indeed, in the 1990s, on average, 600 churches (Black and not) were damaged or destroyed in suspicious fires every year. But according to a nonprofit investigating the issue at the time, between 1990 and 1996, only about 90 Black or multiracial churches in the South were “firebombed, burned and vandalized” — a relatively small number. It is also worth noting that in South Carolina, where 27 churches were burned between 1990 and 1996, eight of the 18 suspects apprehended were Black.
So there was indeed a nasty epidemic of church burnings in the 1990s, but racism seems to have played a distinctly minor part in it.
There is a larger lesson here. Instead of always looking backward to make sure that the most virulent racism of yesterday is truly extinct, Black Americans engaged in what we call “the struggle” should focus on the pressing issues of today and tomorrow.
For instance, we need to get past the idea that all people should go to college and we should put more focus on the value of solid vocational careers. We need to ensure that our children are taught to read the way science shows is most effective: phonics. We need to ask how Black America will deal with an employment world turned upside-down by artificial intelligence.
Of course, we want to acknowledge and thank the people who came before us, those who fought for the lives so many Black people now so comfortably lead. I understand the impulse to honor these predecessors by, as it were, cosplaying as them, battling again what they endured.
But I also suspect that those predecessors, looking at us now, would rather that we faced forward, not backward — just as they did.
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