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Editor’s Note | With No Reckoning, Mississippi’s Evil Past Will Always Haunt Us
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Mississippi Free Press
His son, Raynard Johnson, was hanging from the tree by a belt.
The marchers rejected the official finding that Johnson’s death was a suicide, considering Mississippi’s long, dark history of racist lynchings.
On Sept. 15, 2025, the 21-year-old Black Delta State University college student was found hanging in a tree on campus in Cleveland, Mississippi.
This conclusion first is arrived at in the absence of evidence but then clung to even when the evidence says otherwise.”‘Let the People See What They Did to My Boy’But it’s important to understand why the ghosts of Mississippi’s past still haunt us.
Photo by Heather Harrison, Mississippi Free PressAnd quite frankly, Mississippi’s white leaders haven’t done nearly enough to reckon with our white supremacist past, nor its ongoing manifestations, to expect Black folks to live as if Jim Crow never was.