Suicide or Lynching? Six People of Color Found Hanged in Less Than a Month [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Post on: June 20, 2020 Ezra Brain

In the past month, the bodies of six people of color have been discovered hanging from trees. The police are labeling these deaths suicides, yet the families and community members disagree. Are these hangings the product of a new wave of lynchings by white vigilantes and the police? Content warning: brutality, racist violence against Black men.



Across the country, Black bodies are being discovered hanging in trees and the police are dragging their feet on the investigations. From California to Texas to New York City, more and more Black people are being discovered hanged in the midst of a national uprising against police brutality, and anti-Black racism. In each case, the police have labeled these deaths a suicide with little to no investigation. That the police are doing this — and often disregarding the victims’ families assertions that they were not suicidal — is both outrageous and offensive because it assumes that Black people across the country are suddenly choosing to take their own lives in a way that very specifically evokes the racist violence of the KKK in the Jim Crow era. No, the much more likely scenario is that these men were murdered as retaliation for the mass protests against police violence and that the police are helping to cover it up.

Public outcry has been quick and loud. Parents and loved ones have largely denied that these could have been suicides, and activists have called for more investigation. In response to these pressures, as well as the pressure of the ongoing protests, some police departments have begun to re-examine their initial claims; but it is very clear that the state is perfectly happy for these victims to remain nameless Black bodies. But they do have names. These victims of what are very possibly modern day lynchings include Robert Fuller, a Black man who was found hanging from a tree in Los Angeles where the coroner declared his death a suicide, a ruling that is now being walked back after mass public outrage. Just a few days after Fuller’s body was found, officers from the LA sheriff’s office shot and killed his brother, in an incident that there is no video evidence of.

A week earlier and only 50 miles away, another Black man, Malcolm Harsch, was discovered hanging from a tree across from a library. Police also ruled Harsch’s death a sucidie despite the fact that there was blood on his shirt, possibly indicating a struggle, and Harsch’s family insisted that he was not depressed and that suicide was “not plausable.” Yet another example comes from this past week after Dominique Alexander, a Black man from the Bronx, was discovered hanging from a tree in upper Manhattan. Also in New York City, nooses appeared in a city park the night before Juneteenth. Again, the NYPD was uninterested in investigating. Since May 27, at least six people of color have been discovered hanging in trees across the country.

History textbooks and pieces of art will often try to portray the violence of the Jim Crow era as something that happened in the past, something we have moved on from, but anyone who has been paying attention knows that is a lie. The hundreds of police murders of Black men this year and the very-real possibility that we are in the midst of a modern resurgence of lynching shows that vile ideology of white Supremacy is still a very real threat to Black communities. American capitalism is built upon anti-Blackness and cannot survive without it. Because of this, violence will always be used to continue the racist system. Often this violence will be from agents of the state themselves, as we saw in the murder of George Floyd and so many others. But this violence can and does often come from racist vigilantees, such as in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. These vigilantes are not always explicitly in league with the state but they serve the same purpose. That is why, in the midst of the largest uprising against racist violence in a generation, many are worried that we are seeing a return of lynching. Because by challenging the existence of the armed force of the state and the racism that sustains it, protesters are coming very close to challenging the full system itself. It is no wonder then that vigilantes are taking it upon themselves to attack protesters — be it by driving their car into protests or by a possible return to the murderous intimidation tactics of lynching — and it is unsuprising that the police aren’t investigating.

More:
https://www.leftvoice.org/suicide-or-lynching-six-people-of-color-found-hanged-in-less-than-a-month