The death of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old mother found hanging from a tree in Jackson, Mississippi, has drawn “strange fruit” comparisons as details emerge during an ongoing investigation.

“She did not do this to herself. I know my daughter, and she did not do this to herself,” Fortune’s mother told ABC News. 

Last week, Kenneth Stokes, a councilman for Ward 3 of Jackson, sent a letter to the U.S. Attorney Baxter Kruger which asked for help with the investigation into the causes of Fortune’s death. The Emancipator reached out to Stokes, but has not heard back.

The case has gained prominence as the place and method of Fortune’s death raise the historical specter of lynchings and other violence, even amid a call not to “rush to conclusions” by Bernice King, the daughter of the late Martin Luther King, Jr.  

“There is a highly significant legacy of racially motivated lynchings in Mississippi, vivid in Black collective memory but largely ignored or willfully erased in White collective memory,” Michael Pfeifer, a professor of history at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote in an email to The Emancipator. 

Civil rights leader and field secretary for the NAACP, Medgar Evers, was assassinated in Jackson in 1963. Evers’ death helped build support for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made racial discrimination illegal. 

Mississippi was also where 14-year-old Emmet Till was lynched, a brutal and seminal moment in the Civil Rights Movement.

The county where Fortune’s body was found has its own sordid history of lynchings. Jackson County was the site of 11 known lynchings between 1895 and 1908, according to a list of Mississippi lynchings compiled in the 1990s. Nearby Hinds County, which is involved in the investigation into Fortune’s death according to reporting, saw 34 lynchings between 1835 and 1934, noted in the same list. 

The brutal and traumatic memory of lynchings and also the perception that law enforcement has never adequately served Black people in the South play a role in the reaction to the case, according to Pfeifer.

“And this is backdropped by law enforcement and criminal justice institutions that historically served the needs of the White community but largely neglected the interests of the Black community,” Pfeifer wrote. 

The particular facts of the most recent case are still unclear. 

Earlier this year, the nonprofit group JULIAN, which investigates suspected civil rights abuses, released the “Crimson Report,” arguing that there were at least 70 “modern-day lynchings” across several states in the South between 2000-2025. 

Within Mississippi, they noted 19 lynchings and seven possible hate crimes, the most of any state, and said that the trend had increased since 2021 in the state.  

In many of these cases, law enforcement’s official ruling of “suicides” carries reminders of the legacy of Southern police covering up lynchings and offering only the “illusion of closure” rather than transparency, the report argued. On a call, the organization’s founder added that police were often inadequately trained for these investigations and they brought in a number of assumptions that prevented them from objectively assessing the case in front of them, making “suicide” designations more likely and rigorous investigations more difficult.

“Pretty much every single case I saw, they botched it,” said Jill Collen Jefferson, JULIAN’s founder, who also noted that Mississippi has the least concrete oversight for these kinds of complicated cases.

In the Fortune case so far, in contrast, the police have not made a statement about the death.

It’s too soon to make a determination in the Fortune case, Jefferson argued, and we have to wait for the facts to emerge. 

But in general, the organization noted that, in Mississippi, lynchings have increased since 2021, which Jefferson attributes in part to the radicalized rhetoric around race since Trump rose to prominence as a politician.

These recent hangings occur alongside another uncomfortable truth.

Amid a fatal cocktail of racism, isolation, mental health problems and social media, which broadcasts police killings of Black youth, there’s been a rise in overall Black suicide rates. For the first time, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that young Black men have higher suicide rates than young White men, according to analysis of the data. The sad rise in suicide rates sits uncomfortably with the public perception that Black people, and Black youth especially, don’t commit suicide. 

This trend matters, but it doesn’t say anything about the facts of a particular case, Jefferson said. 

“People need to realize the lynchings are increasing, and we need to stop debating it, because while we’re doing that, people are dying,” Jefferson said.   

Over the past couple of decades, a number of other cases have raised similar pain points as Fortune’s, causing online speculation, official rulings of “suicide,” and skeptical families looking for comfort even while soliciting independent investigations.

2025 – Trey Reed 

In Cleveland, Mississippi, Demartravion “Trey” Reed, a college student, was found hanging from a tree on the campus of Delta State University. 

Trey’s death was ruled a suicide, and there was evidence of suicidal text messages, according to The Mississippi Free Press. 

The family retained civil rights attorney Ben Crump for an independent autopsy. But the family has told the press that Crump’s legal team has gone silent. 

Around the same time as Reed’s body was found, the body of a White man, Cory Zukatis, was found hanged in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The cases are not considered linked.

2018 –  Willie Andrew Jones Jr.

In 2018, Willie Andrew Jones Jr., then-21, was found hanging in a tree in Scott County, roughly 50 miles east of Jackson, where Fortune’s body was recently found. 

Jones was father to a fourth-month-old. 

Police almost immediately concluded that Jones committed suicide. 

The family said that Jones had been lynched. The family noted that reports from Scott County Sheriff’s Department and the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which also looked into the death and also concluded there was no evidence of a murder, contained contradictions. 

The family noted that a witness to an argument, in the minutes before Jones’ death, said that he had been threatened with a gun by his girlfriend’s White stepfather.

The Jones family won a lawsuit against the stepfather by default, meaning that the man did not show up to court, according to reporting on the case, which noted that between 2000 and 2018, there were at least eight Black men discovered hanging from trees in the state, including Jones.

Based on the eventual findings of an independent autopsy, the nonprofit JULIAN called for overturning the original designation of Jones’ death as a “suicide.”

In that same year, in the lead-up to two Donald Trump rallies and a runoff Senate election, nooses were slung over trees at the Mississippi state capitol. 

2015 – Otis Byrd

In 2015, Otis Byrd, a 54-year-old Black man, was discovered hanging from a tree in Port Gibson, a little more than 60 miles southwest of Jackson. 

Byrd was on parole after serving time for a robbery that led to the murder of a woman in 1980, according to reporting.

Byrd’s death led to a federal investigation into whether it was a hate crime. The probe concluded that there “was no evidence to prove that Byrd’s death was a homicide” and was subsequently closed, according to a statement from the U.S. Justice Department.

Byrd’s family hired Michael Baden, the pathologist who had performed the independent autopsy of Michael Brown, to conduct a review. Reporting at the time noted that Byrd’s body was cremated, complicating an independent autopsy.