The demise of a Black Mississippi woman discovered suspended from a tree has resurrected harrowing recollections of the sombre legacy of lynchings throughout the American South.

The body of Tasia Fortune, 29, was discovered on Aug. 3 behind a derelict residence in Jackson, the state capital.

Jarques Ratliff, 51, who is likewise Black, entered a plea of not guilty to the charge of murder on Monday.

Neither police nor prosecutors have proffered a suspected motive, and they indicate that further arrests are anticipated.

Irrespective of the particular circumstances of any given case, for a great many Black people the imagery of a rope and noose conjures the enduring legacy of lynching and vigilante violence perpetrated against Black people in the United States, and it carries with it profound pain and trauma.

“Black folks down here in 2026, we are feeling and experiencing some of the same things we felt in 1956 and 1966, and that should not be happening,” Jackson activist Brad Franklin said of Fortune’s death.

But given that this is Mississippi, and given the racist history of our state, our skin has been inured considerably to contending with it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: September is National Suicide Awareness Month.

This story includes discussion of suicide.

If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988.

Christy Spivey, Fortune's mother, averred that she did not believe race had borne any relevance to her daughter's death.

Spivey is white.

She said Fortune's father is Black.

"I think this is something very personal, very personal," Spivey said, insisting that someone acquainted with Fortune was implicated.

Over the preceding biennium, approximately half a dozen Black women and men have been discovered hanged throughout the South.

In certain of those instances, police expeditiously adjudged the deaths suicides — a determination that has frequently engendered skepticism rooted in historical precedent, particularly when investigators furnish scant evidence sufficient to preclude foul play.

"I say, let the evidence speak for itself," said Sean Joe, a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis and a nationally recognized authority on suicidal behavior among Black people.

"But if... you venture into a definition or a conclusion of suicide, you must adduce some evidence in support of that."

Spivey avers that she is unequivocally convinced her daughter would not have taken her own life.

“Absolutely not.

Even were she capable of scaling that tree, no, no — she would never, under any circumstances, ever,” Spivey asserted.

In Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, law enforcement authorities are conducting an investigation into the demise, on Aug. 21, of Demetrius Eugene Fleming, aged 38.

Police Chief Lawrence Wiggins disclosed on Tuesday that his office is awaiting findings from a medical examiner.

In February, police in Cobb County, Georgia, discovered the body of 21-year-old Kyle Bassinga in a park.

Although investigators asserted that no indication of foul play was present, Bassinga's death "caused many to think of the days of slavery and of Jim Crow," said Cobb County Commission Chairwoman Lisa Cupid.

The September 2025 demise of Trey Reed, a 21-year-old Black student at Mississippi’s Delta State University, was adjudged a suicide, as likewise was that of Dennoriss Richardson, aged 39, in September 2024 in Alabama’s rural Colbert County.

Richardson’s wife, Leigh, has averred that she does not believe he took his own life and, as has transpired in other cases, a private autopsy was conducted, concluding that his death was consistent with a hanging, according to news reports.

Leigh Richardson recounted to ABC News that, notwithstanding the chronic asthma and other respiratory afflictions that would precipitate anxiety attacks in her husband, “that is just not a way that he would even process to leave this world.”

According to the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, upward of 4,400 lynchings were perpetrated in the United States between Reconstruction and World War II.

The 1955 lynching of teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi, precipitated by accusations that he had flirted with a white woman, proved instrumental in catalyzing the civil rights movement.

“These were public, deliberately so, calculated to instil terror not merely in the individuals and their families but in an entire community,” said Karlos Hill, professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma and author of “Beyond The Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory.”

In September, nearly 60 members of Congress affixed their signatures to a letter imploring the Justice Department to investigate the hanging deaths of Black individuals and to enforce the 2022 Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which designated lynching a federal hate crime.

“At this juncture of anti-Blackness and emboldened white supremacy, we cannot remain passive bystanders whilst the strange fruit of Black bodies dangle from trees throughout the nation,” U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley declared in a statement.

The Justice Department acknowledged receipt of the letter but has yet to issue a response, according to the office of Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat and the letter’s lead author.

Trent Thompson, 58, of Florence, Alabama, avers that the recent hangings and fatalities among Black people precipitated discourse within the Black community concerning the demise this summer of Nolan Xavier Wells.

Wells, 18, and Black, having joined friends on a Fourth of July boat excursion to an island off Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, did not return with them; his body was recovered two days thereafter.

Scrutiny of the investigation has intensified against the backdrop of the state’s history of racist violence and its attendant distrust of law enforcement — engendering suspicion within the Black community toward myriad cases involving the deaths of Blacks, Thompson said.

"I am intimately acquainted with the skin I inhabit," he said.