“Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees”
– from “Strange Fruit,” recorded in 1939 by jazz singer Billie Holiday
THE NIGHTMARE OF JIM CROW IS BACK. In a scene ripped from Mississippi’s blood-soaked past, 21-year-old Demartravion “Trey” Reed was found HANGING FROM A TREE on his own college campus. Local authorities rushed to label it a suicide, but his family and a horrified community are sounding the alarm: THIS WAS A LYNCHING.
“Trey Reed was lynched right here,” activist Krystal Muhammad DECLARED at a campus rally, pointing to a history the state desperately wants to bury. Reed’s mother insists his body bore injuries inconsistent with self-harm, yet officials have CLOSED THE CASE. A secret video exists, police admit, but the public CANNOT SEE IT. What are they hiding?
This is NOT an isolated tragedy. SHOCKINGLY, Reed is at least the NINTH Black man found hanging from a Mississippi tree since 2000. Every single death was conveniently ruled a suicide. This is a PATTERN, a chilling resurgence of racial terror meant to send a message. The “Strange Fruit” of the 1930s is blooming again in 2024, and the authorities are LOOKING THE OTHER WAY.
While a White man found hanging the same day garnered no outcry, Black Mississippians are living with a generational terror. “We don’t hang ourselves,” one elder stated, echoing a trauma passed down from slavery. The CDC’s statistics are COLD COMFORT against the visceral, historical truth of the rope as a tool of racist murder.
With a second autopsy funded by Colin Kaepernick pending, the truth fights to surface against a wall of official silence. But one question HAUNTS the South: when a Black body is found in a tree, is it suicide, or is it America’s original sin returning for another harvest? The ghosts of 581 Mississippi lynchings are whispering that we never left those dark woods.
Edited for Kayitsi.com
