Flashback, August 2021:All eyes are in Mississippi this week after two men were found dead, hanging from trees on Monday, Sept. 15, just hours apart. Investigations into both deaths are ongoing.
Demartravion "Trey" Reed, 21, of Grenada, was found early in the day on the Delta State University campus in Cleveland. The young Black man was a student, and investigators initially ruled his death a suicide.
Cory Zukatis, 36, of Brandon, was found later in the day near a Vicksburg casino. Police are still investigating the death.
Investigators say misinformation about both men is spreading online fast, including what the Bolivar County coroner described as inaccuracies about Reed's limbs being broken. Many people shared photos of the wrong Cory Zukatis in relation to the stories.
The cases have drawn national attention from civil rights organizations. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has referred to Reed's death as a lynching, a concern that's resounding across social media.
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Police don't believe the deaths are related.
Zukatis was discovered in a wooded area near Ameristar Casino. He is described as a white male who was homeless.
Clarion Ledger
There is no more blatant form of racial intimidation against a Black person that one can use than that of a noose. The practice of lynching was used against enslaved Black people, but it was an especially popular form of violence against Black Americans after slavery ended.
It is considered a more dated form of violence today, but a story in the Washington Post reports that the practice of lynching never truly stopped.
Jill Collen Jefferson, a lawyer and founder of Julian, a civil rights organization named after the late civil rights leader Julian Bond, has been conducting her own research into lynching in Mississippi and found that at least eight Black people have been lynched in the state since 2000.
America's Black Holocaust Museum
That's probably not the best photo for this story, Mother.
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