By Dominique Heath
Every time another Black person is found hanging, especially from a tree or in a public place, we all think the same thing: Black people do not hang themselves.
Some people hear that and immediately rush to correct us: “Suicide is not exclusive to race.”
And we know, but that is not the point.
The point is that Black people in America have a historical memory that cannot simply be switched off because law enforcement issues a statement.
We know what a hanging Black body has meant in this country.
We know about the thousands of Black people who were lynched while police officers, elected officials and entire communities looked the other way, participated, and even covered it up. We know how many deaths were never properly investigated. We know how often Black families were told to accept an official explanation and move on.
So when Black people see something that looks painfully familiar, our first instinct is often to ask questions. And lately, there have been a lot of questions.
In 2026 alone, at least seven widely reported cases have involved Black people found hanging or deaths under similar circumstances: Kyle Bassinga, Juliana Umba Nzita, To'Nea Nicole Miller, Justice Kai James, Jerard “Jay” Jackson, Tasia Fortune and recently the 32-year-old Black man recently found in downtown Raleigh.
Some of those deaths have been ruled suicides. Some families have questioned the findings. Some have called for independent investigations or greater transparency.
But that is exactly the point.
More than a century ago, Ida B. Wells understood the importance of documenting racial violence as it happened. After three of her friends were lynched in Memphis in 1892, she began investigating the circumstances behind lynchings across the country, comparing newspaper accounts, collecting names and challenging the explanations commonly used to justify the killings.
Her research culminated in works including A Red Record, published in 1895, which used statistics and documented cases to expose the scale of lynching in America and the false narratives often used to defend it.
That same principle still matters today.
The Equal Justice Initiative has done extraordinary work identifying thousands of victims of racial terror. Tuskegee University maintains records extending through 1968. But ask how many Black people have been found hanging in America in the last five years and suddenly there is no easy answer.
You have to search one name at a time. One city at a time. One news story at a time. And that should concern us.
Civil rights organization JULIAN created A Crimson Record, a report examining more than 70 cases it considers suspected modern-day lynchings across seven Southern states since 2000. While it is an important step toward documenting these cases, a credible national tracker could go further by recording the facts surrounding each case and allowing that record to be updated as investigations develop and new information becomes available.
This tracker could include:
- the name and age of the deceased;
- where and when the person was found;
- the investigating agency;
- the initial and final medical examiner findings;
- whether the family disputed those findings;
- whether an independent autopsy was requested;
- whether state or federal authorities became involved;
- whether racial motivation was investigated;
- and whether the case was reopened or reclassified.
That kind of record would create much needed transparency in these sorts of cases. It would make it possible for researchers, journalists and families to examine these deaths collectively instead of relying on scattered information after each case disappears from the news cycle.
We can search historical databases today and identify Black Americans who were lynched in 1926. But in 2026, there is still no authoritative national answer to a much more basic question: How many Black people have been found hanging in recent years, and what happened in each of those investigations?
Until that information is collected, Black communities should not be told that their suspicion is irrational or that the cases are unrelated simply because they occurred in different cities.
If there is no pattern, the facts will show us that. But if there is one, we should never have to look back years from now and wonder why no one was keeping track.
