On August 3, a 29-year-old mother of four named Tasia Fortune was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home in west Jackson, Mississippi. Her death is now being investigated as a homicide, and an arrest has been made — but for a moment, before any of that context existed, all the public had was a Black woman’s body hanging from a tree in a state that invented the modern American lynching.
That moment mattered. Because it wasn’t the first time this year.
Less than twelve months earlier, 21-year-old Trey Reed was found hanging from a tree on the Delta State University campus, just a short drive from where Fortune’s body would later be discovered. Reed’s death was ruled a suicide by the county coroner and, after an independent review, by the state medical examiner. His family never fully accepted that conclusion, and civil rights attorney Ben Crump pushed for further investigation. On the same day Reed died, a white homeless man named Cory Zukatis was also found hanging from a tree in Vicksburg — a case that got a fraction of the attention.
Three hangings from trees, in the same state, inside a year. That is not a coincidence anyone should wave off, and it’s not a coincidence Mississippians are waving off. It’s why Jackson City Councilman Kenneth Stokes wrote directly to federal officials after Fortune’s death. It’s why her mother, Christy Spivey, told reporters flatly that her daughter did not do this to herself.
What makes Fortune’s story land differently than Reed’s is how deeply human the rest of it is once you look past the headline. Before Jackson, before the addiction and the homelessness her family has been open about, she was a kid in western Kentucky — Marion, then Powderly — who was sharp enough to skip her junior year of high school and fast enough to run competitive cross country. She aged out of foster care at 16 and made her way to Mississippi on her own. She had four kids. She’d just started talking to her family about opening a cleaning business. She’d been back in Kentucky for a family reunion weeks before she died — swimming, eating, laughing with people who are now planning her funeral instead of her next visit.
That’s the part a “hanging in Mississippi” headline erases, and it’s the part worth putting back in.
The investigation has since moved from open question to homicide case with a suspect in custody, which is more than Reed’s family ever got. But the reason Fortune’s death detonated online before any of those facts existed is worth sitting with on its own: in a state with Mississippi’s history, a Black body on a rope reads as an accusation before it reads as a mystery. That’s not overreaction. That’s memory. And it’s exactly why coroners, police departments, and universities in Mississippi don’t get the benefit of the doubt the first time — they have to earn it every time, with transparency, fast answers, and cooperation with the families instead of statements at them.
Tasia Fortune deserves to be more than a data point in that pattern. But the pattern is real, and pretending it isn’t doesn’t serve her memory or the next family that has to live through this.