By CHRISTINE MARIE

The summer of 2026 may be remembered as the moment when the social movements were most clearly challenged to combine defense of the Black vote with demands for justice in response to “modern-day lynchings.” This reckoning is, in part, due to the extraordinary press coverage of the suspicious death of Nolan Xavier Wells.

Nolan Wells was a Black teen found dead after a July 4 outing with a group of white students. While not charged and claiming no knowledge of why Nolan died, the students opted for an interview with the right-wing commentator and defender of perpetrators of racialized violence, Brandon Tatum. Likewise, they have not disassociated themselves from a fundraising effort on GiveSendGo, a platform infamous for raising funds for those accused of racist attacks.

Wells’s family was given center place at the July NAACP convention and at the August conference of the National Association of Black Journalists, groups that have given authority to the family’s demand for answers.

Other cases have received less press, but have been drawing attention to a pattern in which police and sheriff’s departments quickly rule Black deaths by hanging as “suicide.”On Aug. 15, the body of a still unidentified Black man was found hanging from tree behind a restaurant in downtown Raleigh, N.C. Police quickly labeled the death as a suicide. This followed the suspicious hanging deaths of Cedric Tayuhe, a Congolese immigrant and community activist, in Harrisburg Park, N.C., in June and 16-year-old Juliana Nzita, also from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Charlotte, N.C., in May.

On Aug. 3, the body of 29-year-old Tasia Fortune was found hanging from a tree behind an abandoned home in Jackson, Miss. Locals reported that the fire department needed a ladder to retrieve her body due to the height of the branch, and her mother is adamant that her daughter was not suicidal.

On June 19, the Miami-Dade NAACP reported that 27-year-old To’Nea Miller was found hanging from a tree in Gwen Cherry Park in Miami, Fla. Her death was quickly termed a suicide, but her aunt finds this ruling unreasonable, and the sealed autopsy records, supposedly available to her family, have not been released to them.

On April 13, an unidentified Latino man was found hanging from a tree in Washington, D.C. Within three days, the death was ruled a suicide, and the Black and Brown communities, despite repeated appeals for evidence, were left without answers.

On March 14, the BBC reported  the recovery of the dismembered body of 25-year-old Rasheem Carter in the woods south of Taylorsville, Miss. Before he went missing, Carter had run into a police station asking for protection from white men following him in three trucks, but was refused help. Frightened calls to his mother about the threat were recorded for posterity. The local authorities still said they suspected “no foul play,” arguing that the dismembering was the work of animals.

In February 2026, the body of Georgia State University student Kyle Bassinga was found hanging in a tree in Cobb County, Ga. In March, his family seemingly accepted law enforcement’s suicide ruling, but community activists continue to demand answers.

The Bassinga hanging was preceded in September 2025 by the death of 21-year-old Trey Reed. Reed was found hanging from a tree near the recreational courts at Delta State University in Cleveland, Miss. While ruled a suicide, national outrage at this decision has kept the case alive, and the family continues to demand facts. As in the Nolan Wells case, the state withheld parts of the victim’s neck from the medical examiner doing an independent autopsy.

Black commentators have begun to refer to this scenario as “lynching by suicide.” Or, as Malik Washington titled a piece in the Vanguard News on April 24, they are “Ruled suicide, Remembered as Lynching” and a sign of the “Return of America’s Oldest Terror.”

While the facts may never be conclusively established for each case, they all share the same pattern. Local and state government dismiss the cases with the ruling of suicide, making their decisions within a time frame that indicates that no honest investigation could have occurred. And secretive (though legal) state processes around evidence and medical reports deny transparency to the family and community. The deck is stacked against justice, and in most cases, legal efforts to get redress have not worked. Yet, the stakes are extremely high.

What is needed is a mass national campaign that educates the broad public about the continued deployment of lynching as part of systematic efforts to terrorize and force the subordination of the Black community to a white supremacist order. Such a campaign is the prerequisite for much needed mass mobilizations that can demand justice in every suspected lynching case.

 One of the tools for that kind of campaign was made public in February of this year.  On the 18th of that month, the civil rights non-profit called Julian and headed by the famous Mississippi attorney Jill Collen Jefferson, released “The Crimson Report”  (Julianfreedom.org). In the spirit of “The Red Record” published by Ida B. Wells in 1895, the Julian report defines the “modern-day lynching,” opens cold cases, and documents 70 lynchings across the Deep South between the years of 2020 and 2025. The report provides new information about how forensic data, in terms of both physical evidence and mental health histories, can be used to delegitimize cover-ups and fuel movements for justice. Activists must study it and find ways to integrate the fight to stop this systemic terror into their work on other issues of repression and oppression.

Photo: Juliana Nzita, 16, was found hanging in a churchyard in Charlotte, N.C. in May.

The post Suspected lynchings create terror: Demand a mass response! first appeared on Workers' Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores.

From Workers' Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores via This RSS Feed.