Tasia Fortune was a 29-year-old Black woman. She was a mother of four. She was found hanging in Mississippi on August 3rd.
Before I talk about “America,” “history,” or “systems,” we need to say her name. We need to remember that a whole life was stolen from this world. She is not a number, not a file, not a news article. She was a beloved daughter, sister, and mother who will never return to her four children. She lived in Mississippi for over ten years; she built a life there and had responsibilities that will now be unfulfilled. When we talk about her death, we’re not talking about an abstraction. We’re talking about a human being whose life was just as valuable as anyone else’s and whose absence leaves holes in the world that can never be fully healed.
We cannot talk about Tasia’s death without talking about where her death occurred. While Mississippi is not the only state where lynchings of Black people occur, it is a state with a legacy of lynchings. The Tuskegee Institute also compiled lynching data and found that the total documented number of lynchings in the United States is 4,743 between 1882 and 1968. Of those recorded victims, 3,446 (about 73%) were Black Americans, and 1,297 were white individuals (including individuals targeted for helping Black people or opposing mobs). It also found that Mississippi has a total of 539 Black victims and 42 white victims, making Mississippi the state with the highest number of recorded lynchings in the United States during that historical period. Yet, those statistics are not simply numbers from another era. Mississippi reported the highest number of modern-day lynchings, with 20 cases, a trending uptick that has been flagged since 2021.
So when a Black woman is found hanging from a tree in Mississippi, she dies against the backdrop of those statistics. While her death and the recent hangings of other Black people may appear to be singular crimes and often ruled “a suicide,” their resonance is part of a long pattern of racial violence that continues to shake Black Americans to this day.
Mississippi authorities have not officially deemed Tasia’s death a lynching. As of this writing, officials have not even publicly stated whether they consider her death suspicious. They have told news outlets that they are “actively working to determine the circumstances surrounding her death.”
That lack of urgency, those empty words, ring all too familiar for far too many. While acts of mob violence and murder were always prohibited under general state homicide laws, lynching is now explicitly classified as a federal hate crime under the Emmett Till Antilynching Act signed into law by President Biden on March 29, 2022. However, in the past, cases of lynchings have rarely been treated with due diligence, and we are seeing that lack of focus today. For example, researchers have found that lynch mobs after 1900 were only convicted about one percent of the time. When Black people have been murdered for decades without their killers facing consequences, it sends a powerful message. Black life has been treated as disposable, and those who end it will likely go unpunished. To hear officials respond to a Black woman hanging in Mississippi with ambiguity and a lack of urgency in 2026 makes it difficult to believe we’ve moved past this period of American history. We still seek answers to the case of Nolan Wells, whose body was found in Mississippi after a July 4th boat trip.
Many want to believe that we’re past the days of lynching. We want to think that those horrors are confined to black-and-white photos and shameful chapters of history textbooks. But stories like Tasia Fortune’s and other recent hangings pull back that veil. They force us to remember that this is the same country that once allowed crowds of people to take the law into their own hands and violently hang Black people from trees. We have not, as a country, eradicated the beliefs that allowed it to happen. The sentiment that Black life is expendable doesn’t disappear because the year is 2026.
The death of Tasia Fortune shows us that there are people in this country who haven’t changed at all. Who are completely willful or indifferent to Black pain. Whether it’s individuals who think violence against Black people is justified, deserved, or not serious enough to interrupt their daily lives; or institutions who respond to these tragedies with doubt instead of belief, delay instead of speed, and deflection instead of transparency, this problem is not specific to one town, one police department, or even one state. It’s an American problem. It is a failure of American morality.
America likes to view itself through rose-colored glasses, to say it is “exceptional” and that it is “great.” But when this is what America represents itself to be to the world, it is not fooling anyone.
Amb (ret) Bonnie D. Jenkins, Ph.D., is the Executive Director and Founder of Women of Color Advancing Peace, Security, and Conflict Transformation (WCAPS). She is the Shapiro Visiting Professor of International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs. She is the former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. She is also a retired Naval Reserve Officer.
There is a person in custody, speculation he's her boyfriend. Hoping to see news coming out to confirm or deny.